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Dessert

Cherry Pudding

A baked pudding made with a dough shell and stoned cherries, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Cherry Pudding

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Add enough milk or water to form a dough and roll it out to ¼ inch thick.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Butter a large bowl and line it with the dough, leaving enough to cover the top.

  2. Fill the bowl with stoned cherries and sprinkle with sugar.

  3. Gather the dough over the top, sprinkle lightly with flour, and cover with a linen cloth, securing it with string.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the bowl in a pot of boiling water and cook for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve with sweet sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough that wraps the cherries and holds the pudding's shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the dough rises and becomes lighter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and helps their flavor come through.
Stoned cherries
Provide the main fruit filling and moisture as they cook in the dough.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth over the bowl. The cloth and string must hold the dough snugly so the pudding keeps its shape and the boiling water cannot seep in and soak the filling during the long steam cook.

“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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