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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A baked pudding made with canned peaches, butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, egg, milk, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 558 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fruit 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 the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the peaches in a baking dish with the butter and add sugar to taste.

  3. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  4. Add the egg yolk to the creamed mixture and re-cream.

  5. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together three times.

  6. Add 2 tablespoons of the sifted ingredients to the creamed mixture and mix thoroughly.

  7. Alternately add the remaining dry ingredients and milk to the creamed mixture.

  8. Stir in the vanilla and beat hard for one minute.

  9. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg white.

Bake and serve

  1. Spread the mixture over the peaches in the baking dish.

  2. Bake for about 45 minutes to 1 hour, covering with a lid if it browns too quickly.

  3. Serve the pudding as it comes from the pan or with an additional sauce.

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. Peach + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together558 recipes

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

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  5. Peach + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolk enriches the batter and the whipped white lightens it and helps it rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, making the batter rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and enriches the peaches in the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it brown as it bakes.
Canned peaches
Provide the fruit base and moisture under the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg white, which lifts the batter. Stirring or deflating it makes the pudding dense.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, egg, milk, vanilla):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, milk, vanilla. 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.

More fruit pudding recipes

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