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Dessert

Strawberry Pudding

A chilled gelatin dessert made with strawberry juice, lemon juice, egg whites, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Strawberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatin base

  1. Soak the gelatin in cold water until softened.

  2. Add boiling water to the gelatin and stir until dissolved.

  3. Mix in the strawberry juice, lemon juice, and salt; set aside to cool until it begins to thicken.

Whip and combine

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff, then add sugar and beat together.

  2. Once the gelatin is slightly thickened, beat it until light.

  3. Fold in the whipped egg whites and whipped cream.

Mold and set

  1. Dip a mold in cold water and drain it.

  2. Fill the mold with the mixture and set aside to harden.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Strawberry + creamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,525 recipes

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

  3. Strawberry + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the strawberry juice into a firm, sliceable pudding structure.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they add lightness and airy texture to the pudding.
Whipped cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the set gelatin's texture.
Strawberry juice
Provides the main flavour and liquid that the gelatin sets.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.

The step that matters

Beat the gelatin mixture while only slightly thickened. If the gelatin is too set, it will not blend smoothly with the foams and the pudding can turn lumpy; if it is too liquid, the mixture will not hold its airy structure once folded.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against strawberry, egg, cream, 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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