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Dessert

Apple, Currant, Cherry, or Other Fresh Fruit Pudding

A suet or butter fruit pudding made with apples, currants, cherries or other fresh fruit, sweetened with sugar and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apple, Currant, Cherry, or Other Fresh Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Make a paste with suet or butter and flour.

  2. Lay a well-floured cloth in a basin, dip it in hot water, wring it dry, and shake it out.

  3. Roll the paste thin and press it evenly into the basin on the cloth.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill the basin with pared, cored, and quartered apples or other fruit.

  2. Moisten the edges of the paste, press them together, and fold them over.

  3. Gather the ends of the cloth and tie it firmly close to the pudding.

  4. Drop the pudding into plenty of fast boiling water.

  5. Lift it out using a strong fork in the corner of the cloth.

Serve

  1. Turn it gently into a serving dish and cut a small round or square from the top immediately.

  2. Serve without delay, accompanied by pounded sugar and good Lisbon sugar.

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. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Apple + winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Suet or butter
Enriches the paste, giving it a rich, tender texture as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the paste that wraps and holds the pudding together.
Apples
Supply the fruit filling, adding moisture and a tart-sweet flavour.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the pudding when served alongside it.

The step that matters

Lift it out and serve without delay. A suet pudding steamed in a cloth firms as it cools, and the paste can turn heavy or soggy if it sits. Turning it out and serving promptly keeps its texture light and its shape intact.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, apple, sugar, nutmeg, apricot, wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, apple, sugar, nutmeg, apricot, wine. 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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