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Dessert

Strawberry Pudding

A chilled dessert made from egg yolks, sugar, berry juice, water, egg whites, berries, and a butter-sugar topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Strawberry Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks with sugar.

  2. Add the berry juice and a little hot water, then simmer until thickened.

  3. When partly cool, stir in the beaten egg whites mixed with a little sugar.

Finish and serve

  1. Fold in the ripe berries.

  2. Serve cold topped with a hard sauce made by creaming the butter and sugar together.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + berrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Berry + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together74 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set during simmering, giving it a rich body.
Egg whites
Add airy lightness to the pudding when beaten and folded in.
Berry juice
Provides the liquid base and fruity flavour for the custard.
Ripe berries
Add fresh strawberry flavour, sweetness and soft fruit texture.
Butter
Enriches the hard sauce with fat for a creamy, firm texture.

The step that matters

Simmer until thickened. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with gentle heat. Simmering too hard or too long can curdle the custard, so keep the heat low and stir steadily.

Swap the berry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Berrythe original

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