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Dessert

Paradise Pudding

A baked apple and currant bread pudding with lemon zest, sweetened with sugar and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Paradise Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine eggs, chopped apples, sugar, currants, bread crumbs, lemon rind and juice, salt, and milk in a large bowl and mix well until all ingredients are combined.

  2. Place the mixture in a pudding bag and boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with your choice of sauce.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Provide the body that soaks up the milk and egg to form a soft pudding.
Apples
Add moisture and tartness that balance the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the texture of the pudding.
Currants
Add small pockets of chewy sweetness throughout.
Milk
Adds moisture so the crumbs and eggs form a tender custard-like texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding bag. The pudding must stay submerged in gently simmering water for the full 2 hours so it cooks evenly. If the water drops below the bag or boils too hard, the pudding can cook unevenly or the bag can burst.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, apple, sugar, bread, lemon, milk. 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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