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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with pineapple, orange, banana, lemon juice, sugar, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in 2½ cups of boiling water.

  2. Add 1 cup of cold water and 2 cups of sugar, stirring until well mixed.

Add the fruit and serve

  1. Sprinkle a little sugar over the chopped fruit.

  2. Once the gelatine is well chilled, add the fruit and mix well.

  3. Serve with whipped 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable pudding structure as it chills.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps draw juice from the fruit.
Pineapple
Adds moisture and tartness that balances the sweetness.
Oranges
Add acidity and fresh citrus flavour to the set pudding.
Bananas
Add body, mild sweetness and soft texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Once the gelatine is well chilled, add the fruit and mix well.. If the gelatine is still warm or runny, the fruit will sink and settle unevenly. Chilling until it thickens suspends the pieces evenly before it sets fully.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, orange, banana, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, orange, banana, sugar. 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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