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Dessert

Cold Fruit Pudding

A chilled fruit dessert made from stewed raspberries, currants, sugar, cornflour, and water, colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cold Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fruit base

  1. Stew the raspberries, red currants, and sugar together until soft.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Thicken and set

  1. Mix the cornflour with the water and add it to the strained fruit.

  2. Boil for a few minutes.

  3. Color with a few drops of cochineal.

  4. Pour into a wetted mold and set aside to firm.

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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cornflour
Thickens the fruit juice into a soft, sliceable set when boiled.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the tartness of the red currants.
Red currants
Provide tart flavor and acidity along with the pudding's color.
Raspberries
Supply the main fruit flavor and aroma of the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for a few minutes. Cornflour is a starch that thickens only when boiled, and it must be fully cooked so the pudding sets firm and loses its raw, chalky taste. Stopping early leaves the mixture thin and unset.

“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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