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Dessert

Cranberry and Apple Pudding

A steamed rice pudding layered with apples, cranberries, raisins, and sweetener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorghum and raisin share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cranberry and Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Steam the rice in a double boiler until soft.

  2. Grease a pan and line it with cooked rice, reserving some for the top.

  3. Peel and core the apples, then slice them thinly.

  4. Halve the cranberries and mix them with the apple slices.

Assemble and steam

  1. Fill the pan with alternating layers of fruit and sweetener.

  2. Cover the top with a layer of rice.

  3. Cover with greased paper and steam for 30 to 45 minutes until the fruit is cooked.

Serve

  1. Turn out onto a hot dish and serve with custard 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. Sorghum + raisintop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rice + sorghumtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Apple + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the soft, moist base and top layers that hold the pudding together.
Apples
Provide the main fruit bulk and tender texture as they cook through.
Cranberries
Add tartness that balances the sweetness of the syrup.
Sorghum or syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture to the fruit layers.

The step that matters

Steaming the assembled pudding. The fruit must cook fully under steam for the full 30 to 45 minutes. Undercooked apples stay firm and the layers do not set into a cohesive pudding. Keeping the paper cover on traps steam so the top rice layer stays moist.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, apple, sorghum):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, apple, sorghum. 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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