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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with oranges, bananas, and lemon juice, sweetened with sugar and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in ½ cup cold water.

  2. Add ½ cup boiling water, ½ cup sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons.

Assemble and set

  1. Cut the oranges and bananas.

  2. Sprinkle the fruit with sugar.

  3. Pour the jelly mixture over the fruit.

  4. Set in a cold place to harden.

  5. Serve with cream, whipped or plain.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  4. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

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

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

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a jelly that holds the fruit in place.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the jelly and the fruit.
Oranges
Provide juicy segments and fresh citrus flavour to the set jelly.
Bananas
Add soft texture and mild sweetness to the fruit layer.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully before adding the hot water. Gelatine must dissolve completely in liquid before it is mixed with the rest, or undissolved granules will leave specks and weak patches in the set jelly.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, orange, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange, 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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