Skip to main content
Dessert

Rhubarb Shape

A molded dessert made from boiled rhubarb, sugar, water, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 546 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Rhubarb Shape

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rhubarb syrup

  1. Boil the rhubarb, water, and sugar together for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the juice from the rhubarb.

  3. Boil the juice for 30 minutes.

Set the pudding

  1. Combine the boiled juice with the rhubarb again and pour into a mold.

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. Rhubarb + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together546 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb
Provides the tart flavour and the bulk of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart rhubarb and thickens the syrup as it boils down.

The step that matters

Boil the juice for 30 minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and natural pectin in the juice. This gives a thick liquid that sets when cooled. Boiling too long can make the pudding stiff or caramelised.

Swap the rhubarb

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Rhubarbthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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 rhubarb pudding recipes

Boiled 5 See all 56 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesRhubarb PieRhubarb Pie152 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes