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Dessert

Dried Apricot Pudding

A baked pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, stewed dried apricots, butter, eggs, sugar, and salt.

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 ↓

Dried Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the bread crumbs.

  3. Stir in the butter.

  4. Stir in the stewed apricots.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Add the sugar, salt, and beaten eggs.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered pudding dish.

  3. Bake for 30 minutes.

  4. Serve with a 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.

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. Milk + breadtop 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a soft, sliceable pudding as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the bread crumbs and supplies moisture for a tender, custardy texture.
Dried apricots
Add fruity flavour, sweetness, and moisture when stewed soft and folded in.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds flavour to the apricots and custard.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Eggs added to very hot liquid can scramble and curdle rather than blending smoothly. Cooling the base first lets the eggs thicken it evenly as the pudding bakes.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, butter, egg, sugar):

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

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