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Dessert

Fruit Mould

A dessert made by layering preserved fruit and crustless bread, baked with butter and sugar, then chilled and served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Fruit Mould

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pour the preserved fruit into a basin.

  2. Add more sugar and cook for 20 minutes.

Build the mould

  1. Butter a basin and line it with crustless bread.

  2. Layer a little fruit, a round of bread, and continue until the basin is full, finishing with a large piece of bread on top.

  3. Pour the juice over the layers and place a weight on top.

Set and serve

  1. Once cold, ice the top and turn out onto a serving plate.

  2. Serve with cold custard poured over the mould.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the structure of the mould and soaks up the fruit juice as it sets.
Preserved fruit
Provides the main flavour, colour and moisture for the mould.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and adds body to the juice.

“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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