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Dessert

Simple Fruit Pudding

A layered pudding made with currants or small fruits, sugar, and bread, served cold with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Simple Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stew the currants or small fruits with sugar to taste.

  2. Cut the bread into thin slices and remove the crusts.

Assemble and chill

  1. Place a layer of bread in a pudding dish.

  2. Cover the bread with a thick layer of the stewed fruit.

  3. Add another layer of bread followed by more fruit, repeating until all ingredients are used.

  4. Finish with an extra thick layer of fruit on top.

  5. Place a plate on top of the pudding and cool it in the ice.

  6. Serve thoroughly cold with cream and sugar.

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

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

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

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

  3. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

  4. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants or small fruits
Provide the main flavour and juice that soak into the bread and set the pudding.
Bakers' bread
Absorbs the stewed fruit juice and gives the pudding its body as it softens.
Sugar
Sweetens the stewed fruit and helps draw out juice from the fruit.

The step that matters

Cool the pudding thoroughly before serving. The bread needs time to soak up the fruit juices and firm up as it chills. Serving it warm would leave the pudding loose and soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread, 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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