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Dessert

An Excellent Apricot Pudding

A pudding made with apricots, grated bread, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and white wine, baked until set.

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 fruit

  1. Halve the apricots and scald them until soft.

  2. Pound the apricots with some or all of the kernels in a mortar.

Make the custard

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

  2. Add sugar, beaten egg yolks, and white wine to the cooled mixture.

  3. Mix the fruit with the other ingredients.

Bake

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

  2. Bake the pudding 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 fruit flavour and most of the pudding's body once pounded soft.
Grated bread
Soaks up the boiling cream and gives the pudding a soft, set body.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and help it set into a rich, smooth custard when baked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the baked surface.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the bread into a custard base.

The step that matters

Bake the pudding for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C). Egg yolks set as they heat, so the custard can curdle or turn grainy if overbaked or heated too fast. Baking gently until just set keeps it smooth and tender.

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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