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Dessert

Black Pudding

A blueberry bread pudding made by stewing blueberries with sugar and water, layering with buttered bread, and served cold with sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Black Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stew the blueberries, water, and sugar together.

  2. Cut the bread into thin slices and spread with butter.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the bread and hot berries in a pudding dish alternately.

  2. Serve with rich sweet cream when perfectly cold.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Blueberries
Provide moisture, flavour, and colour, and their juices soften the bread.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and helps form a syrupy stewed fruit.
Wheat bread
Provides the structure that soaks up the berry juices and sets into a pudding.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread slices.
Rich sweet cream
Adds richness and a cool, creamy contrast to the warm fruit.

The step that matters

Layering the bread with hot berries. The hot juices soak into the bread and soften it, so the bread and fruit must be layered while the berries are still hot for the bread to absorb the juice properly.

“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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