Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Fruit Pudding

A boiled pudding made with pastry dough and fruit, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Boiled Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roll out the pastry dough into one sheet.

  2. Peel and slice the fruit, then place it in the center of the dough.

  3. Sprinkle the fruit with sugar and fold the dough over it like a dumpling.

Boil and serve

  1. Dip a stout cloth in hot water, flour the inside, and place the pudding inside.

  2. Tie the cloth tightly and boil for two and a half hours.

  3. Serve hot with 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Apple + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Pastry dough
Encloses the fruit and forms the outer pudding that holds its shape while boiling.
Apples, peaches, or berries
Provide the fruit filling, supplying moisture and flavour as they soften in the cooking.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out its juices during cooking.
Flour
Dusted inside the cloth so the pudding releases cleanly rather than sticking.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth tightly. A loose cloth lets water seep in during the long boil, making the pastry soggy and diluting the filling. A snug wrap keeps the pudding compact and its shape intact.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes