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Dessert

Simple Fruit Puddings

A layered fruit and bread pudding cooled in the refrigerator, served with sugar or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Simple Fruit Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stew currants or any small fruits with sugar to taste.

  2. Pour the hot fruit over thin slices of baker's bread, making alternate layers of fruit and bread.

  3. Leave a thick layer of fruit on top.

Chill and serve

  1. Place a plate on top and cool in the refrigerator.

  2. Serve with sifted sugar or cream and sugar.

  3. For a variation, use toasted and buttered bread with hot stewed fruit.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's bread
Forms the structure, soaking up the fruit juices as the layers settle.
Currants
Provide the main fruit flavor and moisture through the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Pour the hot fruit over the bread. The fruit must be hot so the bread soaks up the juices and softens evenly. Cooling the fruit first can leave dry pockets of bread and uneven texture.

Swap the apricot

The recipe marks apricot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, sugar, bread, milk, butter, sauce):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

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