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Dessert

Plain Fruit Pudding

A baked fruit pudding made with raisins, apples, bread crumbs, lemon juice, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,920 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Plain Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop together the raisins and tart apples.

  2. Fill a pudding dish with alternate layers of the fruit and bread crumbs, finishing with bread crumbs on top.

  3. Moisten the mixture with lemon juice in cold water.

Bake

  1. Cover the dish and place it in a pan of hot water.

  2. Bake for one hour.

  3. Remove the pan and uncover.

  4. Brown the top nicely.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with orange or lemon 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.

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. Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

  2. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Raisin + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,111 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture to the layers.
Tart apples
Provide moisture and acidity that keep the pudding from drying out.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the fruit juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet fruit flavor.

The step that matters

Cover the dish and bake in a water bath. The hot water surrounding the dish heats the pudding gently, so the custard-like center sets without curdling or drying at the edges. Covering traps steam to keep it moist until the final browning.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, apple, bread. 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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