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Dessert

Norwegian Pudding

A sweet pudding made from prunes, sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, and cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Norwegian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cook the prunes and remove the stones.

  2. Add sugar, cinnamon, and boiling water; simmer for 10 minutes.

Thicken and set

  1. Combine cornstarch with enough water to pour easily.

  2. Add the cornstarch mixture to the prune mixture and cook until the cornstarch is fully cooked.

  3. Stir in lemon juice, then mold and chill.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Prunes
Provide the main fruit flavor, sweetness and body of the pudding.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid into a set, sliceable pudding when cooked and chilled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the fruit and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sweet fruit.

The step that matters

Cooking the cornstarch until fully thickened. Cornstarch only reaches full thickening once the mixture is brought to a boil and held there briefly. Undercooked starch leaves a thin, starchy-tasting pudding that may not set properly when chilled.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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