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Dessert

Another Whortleberry Pudding

A pastry-like pudding made with flour, butter, and berries, boiled for two hours and served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Another Whortleberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Make a paste with the flour and half the butter.

  2. Mix the paste with cold water.

  3. Roll the paste out.

  4. Dot the remaining butter on the rolled-out paste.

  5. Fold the paste over.

  6. Roll the paste out twice.

  7. Roll the paste to a thickness of ½ inch.

Fill and boil

  1. Place a cloth over a bowl.

  2. Lay the paste on the cloth.

  3. Fill the paste with as many berries as it can hold.

  4. Tie the cloth tightly.

  5. Boil in water for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a rich wine 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the paste's structure, giving the dough enough body to hold the berries.
Unsalted butter
Layered into the dough by folding, it adds richness and a tender, flaky texture.
Cold water
Binds the flour and butter into a dough while keeping the fat firm.
Whortleberries
Make up the filling, supplying juice, sweetness and their own flavor to the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly. A loose cloth lets boiling water seep in, which can make the pudding soggy and let the berry filling leak out.

“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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