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Dessert

Berries and Farina

A dessert of stewed berries thickened with farina, served cold with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Berries and Farina

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Wash, stew, and mash the berries in a double boiler.

  2. Add the farina and salt, and stew for 50 minutes.

  3. Let the mixture harden in small cups.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with 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.

  1. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Berries
Provide the fruit flavour and colour, and their juice keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
Farina
Thickens the stewed berries and sets into a soft, spoonable pudding as it cools.

The step that matters

Stewing the farina. Farina must cook long enough for its starch to swell fully and thicken the berries; undercooked grains leave the pudding grainy and loose, and it will not firm up properly as it cools.

“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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