Name: Cold Berry Pudding
Ingredients: stale bread (baker's or light home-made); butter; 1 quart huckleberries; 1 quart blackberries; water; sugar; thick cream; sugar (for serving)

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 and berries

Cut stale bread into thin slices and spread with butter.
In a pot, add a little water and sugar to the huckleberries and blackberries, and stew for a few minutes until juicy.

Assemble and serve

In a buttered pudding dish, layer buttered bread and hot stewed berries, repeating until full.
Top with a final layer of stewed berries.
Optionally, add a soft frosting over the top.
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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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 of the pudding, soaking up the berry juices as it layers.
Butter: Coats the bread and dish, adding richness and helping prevent sticking.
Huckleberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and juice that moistens the bread layers.
Blackberries: Add more fruit flavour, tartness and juice to the layers.
Sugar: Sweetens the berries and balances their natural tartness.
Thick cream: Adds richness and a cooling contrast to the sweet, tart berries when served.

“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.