Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Blackberry

A sweet stew of ripe blackberries thickened with flour and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Stewed Blackberry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the blackberries and place them in a kettle without any water.

Stew and thicken

  1. Stew the berries slowly for a few minutes.

  2. Mix 1 tablespoon of flour with a little sugar for each quart of berries.

  3. Stir the flour and sugar mixture into the berries and cook until thickened.

Mold and cool

  1. Pour the mixture into molds and let it cool.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Blackberries
Provide the fruit body and juice that softens into the stewed mixture.
Flour
Thickens the berry juices as its starch swells when heated, giving the mixture body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the flour disperse evenly before it is stirred into the berries.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and sugar mixture into the berries. Flour added dry to hot fruit clumps easily. Mixing it with sugar first separates the grains, and cooking until thickened lets the starch swell and set the juices evenly.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes