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Dessert

Red Currant Pudding

A pudding made with red currants, sugar, and orange zest, boiled and served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and orange work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Red Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fill a lined pudding basin with red currants.

  2. Add 8 ounces of sugar and the zest of 2 oranges.

  3. Boil for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

  4. Serve with whipped cream in a boat.

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. Red currant + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Red currants
Provide the tart fruit that forms the body and flavour of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances the tartness of the red currants.
Orange zest
Adds aromatic citrus oil that brightens the flavour of the fruit.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange. 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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