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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A chilled gelatin dessert made with sliced oranges, bananas, peaches, pineapple, and a sweet wine and sugar mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the oranges and bananas thinly.

  2. In a pretty shaped dish, layer each kind of fruit until the dish is full.

Make the gelatine syrup

  1. Heat the gelatine, sugar, lemon juice, pineapple, and peaches with the wine.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool before pouring it over the fruit.

Chill and serve

  1. Cover and refrigerate, preferably making it the day before serving.

  2. Serve with cream, and add fresh strawberries if desired.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Peach + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together168 recipes

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

  4. Banana + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable pudding that holds the fruit in place.
Sugar
Sweetens the liquid and balances the acidity of the lemon and fruit.
Sherry or madeira wine
Adds aroma and depth to the syrup that flavours the fruit.
Oranges
Provide bright, citrusy flavour and juicy texture to the layers.
Bananas
Add soft texture and sweetness to the layered fruit.
Peaches
Add sweet, fruity flavour and softness to the syrup mixture.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup before pouring it over the fruit. Hot liquid can soften or discolour delicate fruit and a warm syrup sets more slowly. Cooling it first lets the gelatine set evenly around the layers.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, orange, banana, peach, pineapple. 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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