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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A pudding made from soaked dry bread, eggs, sugar, butter, and dried fruit, boiled and served with sauce or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Pour boiling water over the dry bread until covered.

  2. Let the bread stand until soft.

  3. Drain off the water.

Mix and cook

  1. Add the beaten eggs, sugar, butter, and dried fruit and mix the ingredients thoroughly.

  2. Place the mixture into a floured cloth.

  3. Drop the cloth into boiling water and cover the pot.

  4. Boil for one hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet or sour sauce, or sweetened cream with lemon juice.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + walnuttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together714 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry bread
Soaked soft, it forms the body of the pudding and absorbs the other ingredients.
Eggs
Beaten eggs set when boiled, binding the pudding together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding hold a moist, tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.
Dried fruit
Adds concentrated sweetness, chew and flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Wrapping the cloth. The floured cloth should be tied loosely enough for the pudding to expand as it cooks, yet snugly enough to hold its shape in the boiling water. The flour coating helps form a dry skin that keeps the pudding from sticking to the cloth.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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

More fruit pudding recipes

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