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Dessert

Mixed Fruit Pudding

A baked pudding made with stale bread, currant juice, sugar, raspberries, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Mixed Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mould

  1. Butter a large tin mould that holds 1 quart.

  2. Line the mould with stale bread slices cut into triangles for the bottom and long strips for the sides.

Make the fruit

  1. Boil 1 pint of currant juice with 1½ pounds of loaf sugar to make syrup.

  2. Simmer 1 pint of raspberries and ½ pint of currants in the syrup for 10 minutes.

  3. Fill the mould with the simmered fruit while it is still boiling.

Chill and serve

  1. Cool the pudding over ice or prepare it the day before serving.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + curranttop 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. Butter + sugartop 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

Stale bread
Forms the firm lining that holds the fruit's shape when the pudding is turned out.
Currant juice
Provides the liquid base of the syrup that soaks into the bread and sets the pudding.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it set the fruit into a firm, jelly-like mass.
Raspberries
Contribute fruit flavour, aroma and soft texture to the filling.
Currants
Add tart fruit flavour and body to the simmered filling.

The step that matters

Fill the mould while the fruit is still boiling. Hot fruit and syrup soften and saturate the bread so the lining bonds to the filling. If the fruit cools before filling, the syrup may thicken unevenly and the pudding may not hold together well when unmoulded.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, 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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