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Dessert

Fairy Pudding

A gelatinous dessert made with pink maraschino jelly, custard, sponge cakes, nuts, cherries, sherry, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fairy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Line a 1‑pint mold with pink jelly.

Make the filling

  1. Crumble the sponge cakes and soak them in sherry.

  2. Add soaked sponge to hot custard and stir in dissolved gelatine.

  3. Mix in chopped pistachios, almonds, and quartered cherries.

  4. Fill the mold with the mixture when cool enough not to melt the jelly.

  5. Pour more jelly over the top.

Serve

  1. Once set, turn out the pudding and surround it with whipped cream.

  2. Color part of the cream pale green for decoration.

  3. Garnish the top with fairy butter and small pieces of pink jelly.

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. Almond + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  4. Almond + sherrytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together517 recipes

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

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cakes
Soak up sherry and give the pudding its soft, absorbent body.
Gelatine
Sets the custard so the pudding holds its shape when turned out.
Boiled custard
Forms the creamy, moist base that binds the sponge and nuts.
Pink maraschino jelly
Forms the set, glossy outer layer that is shown on the finished pudding.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a light, airy contrast to the set pudding.

The step that matters

Fill the mold when the mixture is cool enough. If the custard is too hot, it will melt the jelly lining and cause the layers to blur. Letting it cool slightly protects the jelly's set shape.

“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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