Skip to main content
Dessert

Cold Berry Pudding

A cold dessert made with stale bread, butter, berries, sugar, water, thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cold Berry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut stale bread into thin slices and spread with butter.

  2. In a pot, combine huckleberries and/or blackberries with a little water and sugar; stew for a few minutes until juicy.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a buttered pudding dish, layer buttered bread and hot stewed berries, repeating until full.

  2. Top with a final layer of stewed berries.

  3. Serve cold with thick cream and sugar.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its dry, sturdy crumb soaks up berry juice without falling apart, giving the pudding its body.
Huckleberries and/or blackberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and juice that moistens the bread as the pudding sits.
Butter
Coats the bread slices, adding richness and helping keep them from turning soggy on contact.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and balances their natural tartness.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a cool, fatty contrast to the tart stewed fruit.

The step that matters

Stewing the berries until juicy. The berries must release enough juice to soak the bread; if they are underdone the pudding stays dry, and overcooking breaks the fruit down to a thin, watery sauce.

“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.

More berry pudding recipes

Cold 9Steamed 8 See all 44 →

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrown Bread PuddingBrown Bread Pudding47 recipes