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Dessert

An Excellent Apricot Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with apricots, bread crumbs, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

An Excellent Apricot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apricots

  1. Halve the apricots and scald them until soft.

  2. Pound the apricots with some or all of the kernels.

Make the custard base

  1. Pour boiling cream over the grated bread crumbs and let it cool.

  2. Once cool, mix in sugar, egg yolks, and white wine.

  3. Combine the apricot mixture with the other ingredients.

Bake

  1. Line a dish with pastry and pour the mixture in.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Apricot + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Cream + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,760 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the main fruit flavour and body of the pudding.
Grated bread crumbs
Soak up the cream to give the pudding a soft, set body.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the bread crumbs into a smooth base.
Egg yolks
Set during baking to bind the pudding into a custard-like texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the tartness of the apricots.

The step that matters

Let the cream cool before adding the egg yolks. Eggs scrambled by very hot liquid turn grainy instead of smooth. Waiting until the mixture is cool lets the yolks thicken gently during baking.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, cream, sugar, egg, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, cream, sugar, egg, white 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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