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Dessert

Nut Pudding

A baked pudding made with peanuts or walnuts, soaked bread, butter, eggs, sugar, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Nut Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grate the peanuts or walnuts without blanching them.

  3. Soak the bread or zwieback in milk, then drain it.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter with the egg yolks, sugar, and sweet cream.

  2. Mix in the grated nuts and soaked bread thoroughly.

  3. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding dish.

  2. Bake for 1 hour and serve with foam sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Peanut + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the pudding a light, airy structure as it bakes.
Egg yolks
Yolks enrich the batter and help bind it as it sets in the oven.
Butter
Creamed butter adds richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Bread or zwieback
Soaked and drained bread adds body and moisture, lightening the texture of the nut mixture.
Peanuts or walnuts
Grated nuts provide the main flavor and some body to the pudding.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air only while they are intact. Stirring them vigorously deflates the foam, so the pudding bakes denser and less light.

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, egg, sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, egg, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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