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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A gelatin-based pudding made with oranges, bananas, lemons, and optional walnuts, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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

Make the gelatin base

  1. Dissolve the gelatin in ½ pint cold water.

  2. Thin the dissolved gelatin in ½ pint boiling water.

  3. Add the juice of the lemons and 2 cups of sugar. Let the mixture dissolve.

  4. Strain the mixture into a pudding dish.

Add fruit and set

  1. Stir in the oranges and bananas cut into small pieces and a few pieces of walnut meats.

  2. Set aside to cool. Stir occasionally to mix evenly.

  3. Serve with whipped 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Banana + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 soft, wobbly structure as it cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the sharpness of the citrus juice.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity that brightens the sweetness and flavour of the gelatin.
Oranges
Add sweet citrus flavour and juicy pieces to the set gelatin.
Bananas
Add soft body, mild sweetness and creamy texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatin fully in cold water before adding boiling water. Gelatine must hydrate in cold water first so it dissolves evenly; adding it directly to hot liquid can leave lumps and weaken the set.

Swap the walnut

The recipe marks walnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, banana, lemon, sugar, meat, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, banana, lemon, sugar, meat, 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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