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Prune Pudding

A sweet pudding made from prunes, sugar, cinnamon, and corn starch, cooked and chilled.

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and corn work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Prune Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Pick over and wash the prunes, then soak them in 2 cups of cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Cook the prunes in the soaking water until soft, then remove the stones and add the meat from the stones back to the prunes.

Make the pudding

  1. Add 1 cup of sugar, 1 inch of stick cinnamon, and enough boiling water to the cooking water to make 1⅓ cups.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and let it boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Dilute ⅓ cup of corn starch with cold water until it pours easily, then gradually add it to the prune mixture while stirring constantly.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for 5 minutes, then remove the stick cinnamon.

Chill and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and chill.

  2. Serve 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.

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. Cinnamon + corntop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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 flavour and body, softening into the pudding base.
Corn starch
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, sliceable pudding as it heats.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the tartness of the prunes.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch. Starch must be dispersed in cold water first and stirred in while the mixture is hot. Added undiluted, it clumps, and unevenly gelatinised starch gives a lumpy pudding.

“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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