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Dessert

Alberry Pudding

A chilled fruit pudding made with sliced bananas, oranges, lemon juice, and a boiled sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Alberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the bananas.

  2. Peel the oranges and remove the pulp from the white part.

  3. Layer the bananas and oranges in a glass dish and sprinkle with lemon juice.

Make the syrup and chill

  1. Boil the sugar and water together until a rich syrup forms.

  2. While hot, pour the syrup over the fruit.

  3. Chill in the refrigerator until very cold before serving.

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. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bananas
Give the pudding its soft texture and mild sweetness.
Oranges
Add juiciness and bright citrus flavor to the fruit layers.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and adds body to the juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and slows browning of cut fruit.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup while it is hot. Hot syrup thins easily and soaks into the fruit layers, dissolving sugar evenly. If it cools first, it thickens and penetrates the fruit less well, leaving the pudding unevenly sweetened.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe 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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