Name: Easpberry and Currant Pudding
Ingredients: equal quantities of picked raspberries; equal quantities of currants; 10 ounces of sugar

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Easpberry and Currant Pudding

Ingredients

equal quantities of picked raspberries
equal quantities of currants
10 ounces of sugar

Directions

Fill your pudding basin with equal quantities of picked raspberries and currants.
Add 10 ounces of sugar.
Boil for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

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.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Raspberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and juicy body of the pudding.
Currants: Add tart acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar and raspberries.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juice as it cooks.

“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.