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Dessert

Cleveland Pudding

A gelatin-based pudding flavored with sherry, lemon, and currant jelly, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Gelatin and cream match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,628 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Cleveland Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Soak gelatin in ½ cup water until dissolved.

  2. In a saucepan, combine dissolved gelatin, sherry, sugar, and lemon juice and rind; bring to a boil and strain.

  3. Stir cornstarch and egg yolks into the gelatin mixture and cook for 1 minute.

  4. Beat egg whites until frothy and fold into the mixture.

  5. Pour into a mold and refrigerate until set.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, beat currant jelly until soft, then mix in sweet cream and beat until light.

  2. Flavor the sauce with vanilla extract.

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. Gelatin + creamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Sherry + curranttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Gelatin
Sets the liquid so the pudding holds its shape when chilled.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture and add richness to the pudding.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to give the pudding a light, airy texture.
Sweet cream
Makes the sauce smooth and lightens it when beaten.
Currant jelly
Sweetens and flavors the sauce while giving it body.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Beaten whites trap air that gives the pudding its lightness. Stirring them in hard or letting them deflate before folding makes the pudding dense.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, wine, lemon, gelatin, egg, sugar, cream. 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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