Name: Delicious Fruit Pudding
Ingredients: 2 ½ pounds red currants; 2 ½ pounds raspberries; 1 ¼ pounds raw sugar; sliced bread (without crust)

Why it works: Red currant and bread work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 84 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Delicious Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

2 ½ pounds red currants
2 ½ pounds raspberries
1 ¼ pounds raw sugar
sliced bread (without crust)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Mix the red currants and raspberries with the raw sugar.

Assemble and bake

Fill a pudding dish with layers of sliced bread and fruit alternately, leaving a thick layer of fruit on top.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for nearly an hour.

Serve

Serve in the same dish, optionally covered with a knitted cover for appearance.

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.

Red currant + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together84 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 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

Red currants: Provide tart acidity and juice that soaks into the bread as it bakes.
Raspberries: Add fruity aroma and juiciness that moistens the bread layers.
Raw sugar: Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice, helping it form a syrup.
Sliced bread: Forms the structure of the pudding and soaks up the fruit juices.