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Dessert

Frozen Plum-pudding

A frozen dessert made with ice cream, dried fruit, wine, preserves, and chocolate, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and cherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 177 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Frozen Plum-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and wine

  1. Combine the raisins, currants, citron, chocolate, and Madeira wine in a stew-pan.

  2. Heat the mixture slowly for 30 minutes.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

Make and freeze the pudding

  1. Mix the cooled mixture with the ice cream.

  2. Add the strawberry, peach, and cherry preserves and mix well.

  3. Freeze the mixture again.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream flavored with vanilla or maraschino.

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. Peach + cherrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Strawberry + peachtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together228 recipes

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

  3. Strawberry + cherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Chocolate + cherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Ice cream
Forms the frozen base that the other ingredients are folded into.
Madeira wine
Adds aroma and flavor to the soaked fruit and chocolate mixture.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and natural sweetness to the pudding.
Currants
Add tart flavor and chewy texture among the frozen ice cream.
Strawberry preserves
Add sweetness, fruit flavor and softness to the frozen base.
Chocolate
Adds bitterness, depth and color to the mixture.

The step that matters

Cool the heated mixture before adding the ice cream. If the warm fruit and wine mixture is folded into ice cream before it cools, it will melt the ice cream and make the texture watery and icy when refrozen.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, currant, chocolate, madeira wine, strawberry, peach, cherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, currant, chocolate, madeira wine, strawberry, peach, cherry. 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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