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Dessert

Cold Berry Pudding

A chilled dessert made with buttered stale bread layered with stewed huckleberries and blackberries, topped with cream.

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 ↓

Cold Berry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut stale bread into thin slices and spread with butter.

Stew the berries

  1. Add a little water and sugar to the huckleberries and blackberries, and stew for a few minutes until juicy.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a buttered pudding dish, layer buttered bread and hot stewed berries until full, finishing with a layer of stewed berries on top.

  2. Optionally, add a soft frosting over the top.

  3. Serve cold with thick cream and sugar.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the structure that soaks up the berry juice and holds the layers together.
Huckleberries and blackberries
Provide the main flavour and juice that moistens the bread as the pudding sets.
Butter
Adds richness and keeps the bread from sticking to the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart berries and balances their acidity.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a cool, smooth contrast to the warm-sweet berries when served.

The step that matters

Stew the berries until juicy before layering. Berries must be stewed until they release their juice, because hot juice soaks into the bread and sets the pudding. Unstewed fruit leaves the bread dry and the layers unbound.

“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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