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Dessert

Cold Berry Pudding

A chilled pudding made with mixed berries, brown sugar, buttered bread slices, served with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cold Berry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stew the whortleberries, raspberries, blackberries, and currants with brown sugar until combined.

Assemble

  1. Slice the brick loaf and spread each slice with butter.

  2. Cover the bottom of a dish with a layer of buttered bread slices.

  3. Add layers of the fruit mixture and bread alternately until the dish is nearly full.

  4. Top with remaining fruit and let it stand for 3-4 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Whortleberries
Provide the main fruit body and juice that soaks into the bread.
Raspberries
Add bright fruit flavour and juice that moistens the bread layers.
Blackberries
Add deep fruit flavour and juice that softens the bread.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the fruit and adds a caramel note while it stews.
Brick loaf bread
Absorbs the fruit juices and gives the pudding its body and structure.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread slices hold together against the juice.

The step that matters

Letting the pudding stand. The bread needs several hours to absorb the fruit juice evenly. Cutting or serving early leaves dry bread and pooled juice, so the pudding should be fully soaked before serving.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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