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Dried Fruit Pudding

A pudding made from soaked stale bread crumbs, dried fruit, sweet milk, cold water, and sugar, baked slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Dried Fruit Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cook the dried fruit in a little water until nearly done but not broken.

  2. Set the cooked fruit aside to cool.

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the bread-crumbs in the milk and water until soft.

  2. Combine the soaked crumbs with the cooled fruit and add the sugar, stirring lightly.

  3. Pour the mixture into a deep dish, cover it, and place it in a shallow pan of boiling water.

Bake

  1. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 1.5 hours.

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. Peach + appletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread-crumbs
Absorb the milk and water to form the soft, moist body of the pudding.
Dried fruit
Supplies chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavor throughout the pudding.
Sweet milk
Adds richness and moisture, and helps set the custard-like crumb as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the dried fruit.

The step that matters

Cover and set in boiling water. The covered dish in a water bath keeps heat gentle and moist, so the crumbs and milk set evenly without drying or curdling at the edges.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, apple, 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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