Skip to main content
Dessert

Prune Pudding

A sweet pudding made from prunes, milk, flour, eggs, served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Prune Pudding

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Prune Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Scald the prunes and let them swell in water until soft.

  2. Drain the prunes, remove the stones, and spread them on a dish, dredging with flour.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, stir ½ cup of milk gradually with 8 tablespoons of sifted flour.

  2. Beat the eggs very lightly.

  3. Stir in the remaining milk gradually, alternating with the batter.

  4. Add the prunes gradually and stir briskly.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for two hours.

  2. Serve with 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Supply the main fruit flavour and sweetness, and a soft, moist texture once swollen.
Flour
Forms the starch base of the batter and thickens it as it cooks.
Eggs
Add structure and help the pudding set as it cooks.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and makes the batter moist.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually. Stirring the flour into milk slowly, in portions, keeps the starch evenly dispersed. Adding all the liquid at once tends to form lumps that stay in the finished pudding.

“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 prune pudding recipes

Norwegian 7Steamed 5 See all 210 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes