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Dessert

Four Fruit Pudding

A baked pudding made with sliced bread, mixed berries, sugar, and a sweetened egg white topping, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Four Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Butter thin slices of baker's bread on both sides.

  2. Stew together raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and currants, and sweeten to taste.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a pudding dish, layer bread and fruit alternately.

  2. Cover the top with beaten egg whites mixed with sugar.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the frosting is delicately browned.

Serve

  1. Prepare the day before serving.

  2. Serve with cream if convenient.

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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Baker's bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the fruit juices as it bakes.
Raspberries
Add tart, juicy fruit flavour and moisture that soaks into the bread.
Blueberries
Add juice and colour, softening into the bread layers as they stew.
Blackberries
Add juice, tartness and deep colour to the fruit layers.
Currants
Add tartness and concentrated fruit flavour to the stewed fruit.
Egg whites
Whisked with sugar and baked, they set into a light, browned topping.

The step that matters

Bake until the frosting is delicately browned. Egg whites whisked with sugar set and brown in the oven, but overbaking makes them tough and dry. Pull the dish once the topping is lightly golden.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, 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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