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Dessert

Excellent Apricot Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with apricots, cream, sugar, egg yolks, wine, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Excellent Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and custard base

  1. Halve the apricots and scald them until soft.

  2. Pour boiling cream over the grated crumbs of a penny loaf.

  3. When the mixture is half cold, add sugar, beaten egg yolks, and white wine.

  4. Pound the apricots with some or all of the kernels.

  5. Mix the apricots with the other ingredients.

Line, fill and bake

  1. Line a dish with paste.

  2. Pour the mixture into the lined dish.

  3. Bake for half an hour.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Cream + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,760 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Apricots
Provide the main fruit flavour and soft body of the pudding.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, soft texture once it sets.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the pudding set as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the apricots.
Penny loaf crumbs
Soak up the cream and give the pudding body and structure.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Add the beaten yolks only when the mixture is half cold. Egg yolks thicken on heat, so adding them to a very hot mixture can scramble them and leave a grainy texture instead of a smooth set.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, egg, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, white wine. 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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