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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A dessert made by layering bread slices with stewed fruit, sweetened with sugar, and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stew the currants or small fruits and sweeten with sugar to taste.

Layer and set

  1. In a suitable dish, layer thin slices of bread, then pour the hot stewed fruit over it.

  2. Continue layering with bread and fruit, finishing with a layer of fruit on top.

  3. Cover with a plate and let cool.

  4. Refrigerate until set.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and cream.

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

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

  2. Currant + peachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Bread + peachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

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

  4. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread slices
Absorb the hot fruit juices and form the soft body of the pudding.
Currants or small fruits
Add moisture and tartness that flavour the bread as it soaks.
Sugar
Sweetens the stewed fruit and balances its tartness.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth contrast to the fruit at serving.

The step that matters

Refrigerate until set. The pudding firms as the bread cools and absorbs the fruit juices. Serving it before it has chilled fully can leave it loose and watery, since the starch in the bread needs time to set.

Swap the peach

The recipe marks peach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, sugar, bread, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, sugar, bread, cream. 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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