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Dessert

Frozen Pudding

A pudding made by layering stale cakes, jam, wine, custard, and freezing it in an ice‑salt bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and strawberry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Frozen Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a melon-shaped pudding mold with butter.

  2. Layer stale plum cake at the bottom, followed by a layer of jam, then more cake, and repeat until the mold is nearly full.

  3. Pour in the Madeira wine or brandy.

Add the custard and freeze

  1. Prepare a soft custard and fill the mold with it.

  2. Let it stand until the cake is soft.

  3. Place the mold in a mixture of ice and salt, covering it completely, and let it stand for 6 to 8 hours.

Unmould and serve

  1. Quickly dip the mold in boiling water, then turn it out onto a dish.

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. Plum + strawberrytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Butter + strawberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Plum + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together710 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Strawberry + madeira winetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + madeira winetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale plum cake
Forms the main structure of the pudding, soaking up the custard and wine as it softens.
Strawberry or raspberry jam
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour between the cake layers.
Madeira wine or brandy
Adds aroma and flavour, and moistens the cake layers.
Soft custard
Provides moisture and richness that softens the cake and sets to a creamy texture when frozen.

The step that matters

Dipping the mold in boiling water. A very brief dip loosens the frozen outer layer so the pudding releases cleanly. Leaving it in too long begins to melt the surface and can distort the shape.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, strawberry, madeira wine):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, strawberry, madeira wine. 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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