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Dessert

Red Currant Pudding

A baked pudding made from red currant pulp, crumbed bread, sugar, and puff pastry, served warm with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Red Currant Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Press the currant pulp through a sieve to remove the seeds.

  2. Mix the currant pulp with crumbed bread and sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the mixture in a baking dish and cover with a rim of puff pastry.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

  3. Serve warm 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. Red currant + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together84 recipes

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

  3. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

  4. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  5. Red currant + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant pulp
Provides the main fruit flavour and tartness, and most of the moisture in the pudding.
Crumbed bread
Absorbs the juice and thickens the pulp so it holds together when baked.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart currant pulp and helps the top brown in the oven.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, golden, flaky topping over the fruit mixture.

The step that matters

Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown. The pastry rim must be fully baked and browned, so the crust is crisp and cooked through rather than pale and doughy. Watching colour is the cue, since the fruit underneath is already cooked.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, 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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