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Dessert

Berry Pudding

A steamed berry pudding made with a stiff batter, stewed berries, and buttered bread layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Berry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix cold water, flour, and salt in a bowl to make a stiff batter.

  2. Beat the batter until smooth.

  3. Fold in as many berries as you can.

  4. Flour a cloth, pour in the batter, and tie it tightly.

  5. Boil the wrapped batter for four hours.

Prepare the fruit and assemble

  1. In a separate pot, stew the berries with brown sugar until combined.

  2. Layer slices of buttered bread and the stewed fruit in a dish until nearly full.

Rest and serve

  1. Let it stand for three to four hours before serving with sugar and cream.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the stiff batter that holds the pudding together when boiled.
Mixed berries
Provide moisture, tartness, and colour to the pudding and stewed fruit.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the stewed berries and adds a deeper, molasses-like flavour.
Slices of bread
Soak up the stewed fruit juices, giving the layers a softer, moist texture.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth tightly before boiling. A loose cloth lets water seep into the batter and lets the pudding spread out. A snug wrap keeps the batter compact and moist as it steams for four hours.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, bread. 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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