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Dessert

Norwegian Prune Pudding

A pudding made from prunes, sugar, cinnamon, and cornstarch, chilled and served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Norwegian Prune Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Wash the prunes.

  2. Soak the prunes in cold water for one hour.

  3. Boil the prunes until soft.

  4. Remove the stones and crack them.

  5. Remove the meats from the stones.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the meats to the prunes along with sugar, cinnamon, and boiling water.

  2. Simmer the mixture together for 10 minutes.

  3. Blend the cornstarch with a little cold water.

  4. Slowly add the cornstarch mixture to the prune mixture while stirring continuously.

  5. Remove the cinnamon stick.

  6. Add lemon juice.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  2. Chill the pudding.

  3. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Provide the main fruit body and sweet, dark flavour of the pudding.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid into a set, sliceable pudding as it cooks and cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the prunes and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet prune mixture.

The step that matters

Slowly add the cornstarch mixture while stirring continuously. Cornstarch clumps if dropped in at once. Adding it slowly while stirring disperses the starch so it thickens smoothly and evenly as the mixture heats.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, 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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