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Dessert

Norwegian Prune Pudding

A pudding made from prunes, sugar, cinnamon, and water, thickened with corn starch and served chilled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Norwegian Prune Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Pick over and wash the prunes, then soak them in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the prunes until tender, then remove the stones and add the meat from the stones back to the prunes.

Make the pudding

  1. Add sugar, cinnamon, and boiling water to the prunes and simmer for 10 minutes.

  2. Dilute the corn starch with enough cold water to pour easily, then add it to the prune mixture and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Remove the cinnamon.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  5. Chill.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cinnamon + corntop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Prunes
Provide the main body, sweetness and fruity flavour of the pudding.
Corn starch
Thickens the prune liquid so the mixture sets into a firm pudding when chilled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the prunes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the prunes.

The step that matters

Dilute the corn starch before adding it. Corn starch added undiluted clumps when it hits hot liquid and cannot thicken evenly. Mixing it with cold water first lets the starch disperse, and it gelatinises as the mixture cooks, giving a smooth, set pudding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cinnamon, corn):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, corn. 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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