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Dessert

Blueberry Pudding

A baked blueberry and bread pudding topped with browned egg white and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Blueberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Sweeten and stew the blueberries until soft.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a baking dish, layer the crumbled bread and blueberries, adding bits of butter between layers.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 30 minutes.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites with the sugar until smooth, then spread over the pudding and brown under the broiler.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Egg + sugartop 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

Blueberries
Provide fruit flavour and moisture that soften the bread as the pudding bakes.
Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up juices to hold a soft, spoonable structure.
Egg whites
Beaten with sugar, they form a meringue that sets and browns on top.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and, whipped into the egg whites, stabilises the meringue topping.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue under the broiler. Egg white meringue can go from pale to burnt in seconds under a broiler. Watch closely so the sugar browns evenly without scorching, and the top sets while the pudding stays moist underneath.

“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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