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Dessert

Blackberry Mush

A sweet blackberry mush made by mashing berries, adding sugar and flour, simmering, and serving with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Blackberry Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Put the blackberries in a preserving kettle and mash them to a pulp.

  2. Add enough sugar to make it quite sweet.

  3. Set the kettle over the fire and bring to a simmer.

  4. Gradually stir in the flour while boiling, stirring constantly.

Serve

  1. Serve warm or cold with 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Blackberries
Provide the fruit pulp, moisture and main flavor of the mush.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the blackberries.
Flour
Thickens the mixture as its starch swells and sets when heated in the boiling juice.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour gradually while boiling. Adding flour slowly while stirring constantly keeps it dispersed in the hot liquid. Dumped in at once or left unstirred, flour clumps into lumps and the mush thickens unevenly.

“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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