Name: Damson Pudding
Ingredients: damsons (or other fruit); sugar; flour (for dusting); greased paper (if steaming)

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Damson Pudding

Ingredients

damsons (or other fruit)
sugar
flour (for dusting)
greased paper (if steaming)

Directions

Prepare

Line a basin as you would for Apple Pudding.
Half fill it with damsons, then add sugar, and top with more damsons.
Cover the basin and seal the edges carefully.

Cover and cook

If boiling, tie a scalded, well-floured cloth over it; if steaming, cover with greased paper.
Cook for 2 to 3 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.

Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Damsons: Provide the fruit filling, releasing juice that moistens the pudding as it cooks.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart damsons and helps draw out their juice into a syrup.

“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.