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Dessert

Huckleberry Pudding

A sweet pudding made with sugar muffins or bread, huckleberries, milk, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Huckleberry Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the muffins and place them in a bowl.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the muffins, cover with a plate, and let it stand for 30 minutes.

Make and bake

  1. Add eggs, sugar, salt, extracts, and huckleberries; mix well.

  2. Transfer the mixture into buttered pudding dishes and bake for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with wine sauce.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Clove + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Muffins
Bread soaked in hot milk forms the soft, absorbent base that holds the custard.
Eggs
Eggs set during baking, giving the pudding its structure and custard-like body.
Milk
Liquid that soaks the bread and, with the eggs, forms the custard that sets.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the eggs and spices.
Huckleberries
Add tart fruit flavour and pockets of juice throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake until just set. Eggs set as they heat, so overbaking can make the custard grainy, dry, or curdled, while underbaking leaves it loose and watery in the centre.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Gingerfits about as well

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