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Dessert

Quickly-made Cold Fruit Pudding

A chilled pudding made by layering bread strips with stewed fruit and sugar, then pressing and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and plum work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Quickly-made Cold Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the stale bread into strips about ½ inch thick.

  2. Line a pint pudding basin with the bread strips, covering every part of the basin.

Make and set the pudding

  1. Wash the fruit and stew it with the sugar and water until soft. (If using rhubarb, it can be stewed without water.)

  2. Pour the stewed fruit into the lined basin and cover the top with a slice or pieces of bread.

  3. Place a plate with a weight on top to press the pudding down.

  4. When cool, turn it out onto a dish.

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. Bread + plumtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 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

Stale bread
Forms the outer shell that holds the fruit in its shape.
Fresh fruit
Provides the main body, flavour and moisture of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps it soften while stewing.

The step that matters

Pressing the pudding while it cools. Pressing with a weight compacts the fruit and bread so the pudding holds its shape when turned out. Letting it cool fully before turning out lets the juices thicken and firm slightly, reducing the chance it collapses.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar. 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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