Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A baked fruit pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, lemon peel, raisins, figs, and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Beat the eggs until light and stir them into the butter and sugar mixture.

  3. Add the flour and grated lemon peel, mixing until thoroughly blended.

  4. Dredge the raisins, figs, and citron with flour, then stir them into the batter.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture into a large mold and boil for 3 hours.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs add air and lift, and bind the batter into a rich, set crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the pudding a tender, rich texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.
Figs
Add soft, sweet fruit pieces and moisture to the batter.

The step that matters

Dredging the fruit in flour. Coating the raisins, figs, and citron in flour helps keep them suspended in the batter rather than sinking to the bottom during the long cook.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, raisin, fig):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Datesfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, raisin, fig. 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.

More fruit pudding recipes

Steamed 91Boiled 17Cold 14English 14Baked 12Tapioca 11 See all 210 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes