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Dessert

Fig Pudding

A gelatin-based dessert made with figs, orange juice, lemon juice, sugar syrup, egg white, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fig Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water until soft.

  2. Cook the sugar and boiling water to make a syrup.

  3. Pour the boiling syrup over the gelatine and stir until dissolved.

  4. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  5. Cover the chopped figs with lemon juice and let them sit.

Make the pudding

  1. Whip the egg white and add the whipped cream, placing the bowl in a pan of ice water.

  2. Stir in the gelatine mixture until it thickens.

  3. Add the figs to the pudding mixture and let it chill on ice until thickened.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + figtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together407 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a soft, sliceable pudding.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and an airy, light texture to the pudding.
Egg white
Whipped to foam, it adds lightness and volume to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps form the syrup base.
Figs
Provide the main fruit flavour and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the gelatine mixture in over ice. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, so the mixture must be thick enough to hold the whipped foam and cream without deflating. Chilling over ice while stirring keeps it cool enough to thicken evenly, but it must not set fully before the figs and foam are folded in.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Blackberryfits about as well
  4. Figthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, cream, orange, lemon. 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 fig pudding recipes

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