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Dessert

Currant Pudding, Black, Red, or White

A pudding made with stale bread and currants, boiled with sugar and baked under a weight.

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 ↓

Currant Pudding, Black, Red, or White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease a round basin with butter.

  2. Place the round piece of bread at the bottom and arrange the bread fingers upright around it, leaving 1 inch between each.

Cook the currants

  1. In a saucepan, boil the currants with the sugar until the juice flows freely.

  2. Gently pour the currants and juice into the basin, starting with the solid part to keep the bread in place.

Press and serve

  1. Cover the top with small pieces of bread, place a plate on top, and weigh it down to squeeze out the juice.

  2. Let the pudding cool completely before serving.

  3. Turn it out before serving and accompany with custard or cream.

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. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and juice that soaks into the bread and moistens it.
Stale bread
Gives structure, absorbing the juice so the pudding holds its shape when turned out.
Sugar
Sweetens the currants and helps draw out their juice as they boil.

The step that matters

Cool completely before turning out. As the juice soaks into the bread and the pudding cools, it firms and holds its shape. Turning it out too early, while still warm and loose, can cause it to collapse.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, butter. 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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