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Dessert

Fresh Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, egg yolk, fresh fruit, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, and beaten egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fresh Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the egg yolk and mix well.

  2. Clean and dredge the fresh fruit in flour, then set the fruit aside to dry.

Make the batter

  1. Add the milk and flour to the butter mixture and mix well.

  2. Sift the baking powder and salt with the flour before adding.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg white gently.

Steam and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold and cover the mold tightly.

  2. Steam for 30 minutes.

  3. Place the mold in a warm oven and bake for 3 hours.

  4. Serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to create a tender, rich crumb structure.
Egg white
Beaten and folded in to add lightness and help the pudding rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Fresh fruit
Adds moisture, flavour and tartness throughout the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the batter together.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg white intact. Stirring vigorously would deflate it, leaving the pudding denser and less light after cooking.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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