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Dessert

A Delicate Pudding

A delicate pudding made with corn starch, eggs, sweet milk, butter, and flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

A Delicate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Mix corn starch with a little cold water.

  2. Boil 1 pint of water on the stove.

  3. Stir in the corn starch and well-beaten egg whites, and let it boil once.

  4. Pour the mixture into a 3-pint earthen pudding dish.

  5. Steam the pudding for 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil egg yolks, sweet milk, and butter for a few minutes.

  2. When cool, flavor the sauce with lemon or vanilla.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding cold.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a soft, sliceable pudding as its granules swell with heat.
Egg whites
Whisked into the hot mixture, they set during cooking and give the pudding a light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Cooked with the milk, they thicken the sauce and add richness and a smooth texture.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid base of the sauce and adds creaminess and mild sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a rounder, richer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Let the starch mixture boil once. Cornstarch granules only swell and thicken fully when heated to a boil. Stopping early can leave the pudding thin or grainy, and boiling too hard for too long can break it down.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, egg, milk, 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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