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Dessert

Cherry Pudding

A baked cherry pudding made with a dough of flour, baking powder, salt, and cherries, cooked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Cherry Pudding

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Make a dough with flour, baking powder, salt, and enough milk or water to form a paste.

  2. Roll out the dough to ¼ inch thick.

Fill and wrap

  1. Butter a large bowl.

  2. Line the bowl with the dough, leaving enough to fold over the top.

  3. Fill the bowl with stoned cherries.

  4. Sprinkle the cherries with sugar.

  5. Gather the dough over the top.

  6. Sprinkle the dough with flour.

  7. Cover the dough with a linen cloth, securing it with string.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the bowl in a pot of boiling water.

  2. Cook for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve with sweet 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 dough that wraps the cherries and holds its shape during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping it rise and turn light and tender.
Stoned cherries
Provide the fruit filling, releasing juice that moistens the pudding as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and helps draw out their juice into the filling.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth over the bowl. The cloth must be tied snugly so steam from the boiling water cannot seep in and make the pudding soggy. Keeping the water boiling steadily through the whole cooking time helps the dough set evenly.

“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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