Skip to main content
Dessert

Apricot Pudding

A baked apricot pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, sugar, eggs, sherry, and apricots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apricot and sherry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 173 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  2. When the mixture is half cold, add the sugar.

  3. Add the whisked eggs and sherry.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Halve the apricots.

  2. Scald the apricots until soft.

  3. Mash the apricots with a spoon, adding a few pounded kernels.

  4. Mix the fruit with the other ingredients.

Bake

  1. Place a border of pastry around a baking dish.

  2. Fill the dish with the mixture.

  3. Bake for 45 minutes.

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. Apricot + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together173 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Apricot + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and give the pudding its body and soft, set crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking to give a custard-like texture.
Apricots
Provide the main fruit flavour and moisture, softened by scalding before mashing.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and softens the bread crumbs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Scald the apricots until soft. Apricots that stay firm will not mash into the mixture and can leave uneven pockets of fruit. Softening them fully lets them blend evenly and release their juices into the custard.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, egg, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, egg, sherry. 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.

More apricot pudding recipes

Baked 8 See all 61 →

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrown Bread PuddingBrown Bread Pudding47 recipes