Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Apricot Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Divide the apricots and remove the stones.
In a saucepan, combine the apricot halves, sugar, and water. Shake well.
Cook until half done, then pour into a buttered pudding basin lined with suet paste.
Steam and serve
Cover with more suet paste, tie with a pudding cloth, and boil in water for 2 hours.
Remove from water, untie the cloth, and turn out onto a dish.
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.
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Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,630 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 fruit filling and its flavour, softening as they cook.
- Caster sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and helps it keep its flavour and shape while cooking.
- Suet paste
- Forms the outer pastry casing that holds the filling and cooks through during boiling.
The step that matters
Cooking the apricots until half done. Partly cooking the fruit before it goes into the pastry lets it soften without turning to mush inside the steaming pudding, and it controls the moisture so the pastry does not become soggy.
“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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