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Dessert

Frozen Pudding

A chilled milk and egg pudding flavored with vanilla, sweetened with sugar, and studded with raisins, candied cherries, and optional fruit or nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Frozen Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a pot.

  2. Mix the sugar and flour together.

  3. Beat the eggs until light.

  4. Add the beaten eggs to the hot milk.

  5. Cook the mixture until it thickens.

  6. Cool the mixture.

Freeze and finish

  1. Add the cream and vanilla.

  2. Freeze the mixture.

  3. Once frozen, mix in Sultana raisins, candied cherries, and any fruit or nuts you like.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Vanilla + rumtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together728 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Thicken the custard as they cook and add richness to the frozen pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and lowers the freezing point so it stays softer.
Flour
Helps thicken the milk mixture so the custard holds together.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving a smoother, creamier texture after freezing.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard that the eggs and flour thicken.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until it thickens. Eggs must be cooked gently enough to thicken the custard without scrambling. Stop once it coats a spoon, since overcooked egg turns grainy and curdled.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Bananafits about as well
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, flour, cream, vanilla, rum. 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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