Name: Bread and Fruit Pudding
Ingredients: butter; moist sugar; stale bread (thick slices, about ½ inch); fruit (any kind); sugar (for stewing); powdered sugar (for serving)

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 ↓

Bread and Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

Butter a pudding basin and sprinkle some moist sugar over it.
Line the basin with thick slices of stale bread, overlapping them.
Place a round piece of bread at the bottom.

Fill and set

Stew the fruit with sugar (do not add water) until boiling.
Pour the stewed fruit into the basin to fill it.
Let the pudding cool completely.

Serve

Cover with a large plate and turn it out.
Serve with powdered sugar.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread: Forms the structure of the pudding, soaking up the fruit juices as it sets.
Fruit: Provides the main moisture and flavour, cooked down with sugar into the filling.
Moist sugar: Sweetens the pudding and caramelises lightly against the buttered basin.
Butter: Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly when turned out.