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Dessert

Excellent Apricot Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with apricots, cream, sugar, egg yolks, wine, and bread crumbs, baked in a pastry-lined dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Excellent Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Halve the apricots and scald them until soft.

  2. Pour boiling cream over the crumbs from the penny loaf.

  3. Pound the apricots with some or all of the kernels.

Make the mixture

  1. When the mixture is half cold, add sugar, beaten egg yolks, and white wine.

  2. Mix the apricots with the other ingredients.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a shallow dish with pastry, pour in the mixture, and bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Dust with a little sugar before serving.

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. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Cream + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,760 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Apricots
Provide the main fruit flavour and a soft, moist body once pounded.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the pudding.
Beaten egg yolks
Add richness and help the pudding set as it bakes.
Crumbs from a penny loaf
Absorb the cream and give the pudding body and structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly.
White wine
Adds a bright acidity and aroma that balances the richness.

The step that matters

Cooling the cream before adding the yolks. Pouring hot cream straight onto egg yolks can scramble them into lumps. Letting the mixture cool to half cold first keeps the yolks smooth and lets them thicken gently in the oven.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, white wine. 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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