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Dessert

Danish Pudding

A fruit pudding made with claret, sherry, raspberry juice, sugar, lemon, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Danish Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine claret, sherry, raspberry juice, loaf sugar, lemon juice, and lemon peel.

  2. Heat the mixture until it boils, then remove from heat.

Set

  1. Add isinglass and stir until dissolved.

  2. Strain the mixture into a mold and let it set.

Serve

  1. Serve with vanilla-flavored custard 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. Raspberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sherry + raspberrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Raspberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Isinglass
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon and wine.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Claret
Adds wine flavour, acidity and deep colour to the jelly.
Raspberry juice
Adds fruity flavour and colour to the jelly.

The step that matters

Dissolve the isinglass completely. Isinglass is a collagen-based gelling agent that sets as the liquid cools. If it is not fully dissolved, undissolved specks will remain and the jelly may set unevenly or with weak spots.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, raspberry, 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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