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Dessert

To Make an Orange Pudding

A fruit pudding made with oranges, lemons, apples, and puff pastry, simmered in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Make an Orange Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Boil the oranges and lemons in 5 quarts of water until the rinds are tender.

  2. Remove the fruits and let them cool, then slice the cooled fruits thin and remove the seeds.

Make the syrup and apples

  1. Combine 1 pound of loaf sugar with 1 pint of water in a separate pot and bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. Add the sliced pippins to the boiling syrup and cook them until tender.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the sliced lemons and oranges in a dish, alternating with the cooked apples.

  2. Pour the syrup over the layered fruit.

  3. Cover with puff pastry and bake until golden.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden top crust over the layered fruit as it bakes.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup that soaks into the fruit and gives it body.
Pippins (apples)
Cook down in the syrup to a tender layer that holds its shape between the citrus slices.

The step that matters

Cooking the citrus rinds until tender. Rinds must be fully softened before slicing, because pectin and cellulose in the peel break down slowly with heat. Underdone rinds stay tough and bitter in the finished dish.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, sugar. 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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