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Dessert

Plum or Fruit Pudding

A baked pudding made with grated stale bread, flour, butter, dried cherries, damsons, eggs, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Plum or Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the grated bread with the flour.

  2. Cream the butter until light and fluffy.

  3. Beat the egg whites and yolks until very light.

Make the batter

  1. Combine the bread, butter, cherries, damsons, and sugar.

  2. Fold in the beaten eggs to form a stiff batter.

Boil

  1. Tie the mixture in a clean towel and boil like an apple dumpling.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Stale bread
Provides the bulk and body that holds the pudding together.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and lighten it, giving structure as the pudding sets.
Flour
Helps thicken the batter and gives it structure.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavour.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten eggs to form a stiff batter. Folding keeps the air beaten into the eggs; stirring hard would deflate it and leave the pudding dense. The batter must be stiff enough to hold its shape in the towel.

“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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