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Dessert

Farina Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, farina, butter, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind, served with a buttery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Farina Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a pot, cook together milk, farina, and butter until thickened.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add egg yolks, sugar, and lemon rind, then mix well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Grease a pudding dish with butter and flour, then pour in the pudding mixture.

  6. Place the dish in a pan of boiling water and bake for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Cream together egg yolks and sugar for the sauce.

  2. Add butter and cream to the sauce.

  3. Simmer the sauce for a few moments.

  4. Set the sauce in a bowl of hot water.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Farina
Thickens the milk into a soft, set custard-like base for the pudding.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they lighten the pudding and give it an airy rise.
Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and help bind it, and form the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to both the pudding and the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and sauce and helps cream the yolks smooth.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten egg whites trap air that gives the pudding its light texture. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, leaving a dense result.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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