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Dessert

An Excellent Apricot Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with apricots, cream, sugar, egg yolks, wine, and pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

An Excellent Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apricots

  1. Halve the apricots and scald them until soft.

  2. Pound the apricots with some or all of the kernels in a mortar.

Make the filling

  1. Pour boiling cream over the grated crumbs and let it cool slightly.

  2. Stir in sugar, beaten egg yolks, and white wine.

  3. Mix the pounded apricots with the cream mixture.

Bake

  1. Line a dish with pastry, pour in the mixture, and bake for 30 minutes.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Cream + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,760 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit flavour and bulk of the pudding, softened and pounded into the filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard-like filling and enrich it as it sets in the oven.
Grated crumbs
Soak up the boiling cream and give the filling body and structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the tartness of the apricots.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and moisture, and softens the crumbs into a smooth base.

The step that matters

Pouring boiling cream over the crumbs. Hot cream must be poured over the crumbs and allowed to cool only slightly before the egg yolks are added. Adding yolks to very hot liquid can scramble them, while cooling it too much leaves the crumbs unsoftened and the filling lumpy.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, white 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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