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Dessert

Strawberry Pudding

A gelatin-based dessert with strawberries, custard, and frothy egg white topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup of water for 1 hour.

  2. Add 1 cup of sugar and 1 pint of boiling water to the gelatine and stir until combined.

  3. When nearly cold, stir in 1 quart of strawberries.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold or deep dish and refrigerate until hardened, preferably overnight.

Make the custard

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk with 6 eggs until thickened.

  2. Reserve the whites of 3 eggs for frosting.

  3. Add a pinch of salt and 1 cup of sugar to the custard.

Assemble and serve

  1. Just before serving, beat the reserved egg whites until frothy and drop them into hot milk.

  2. Pour the custard over the gelatine and dot the frosting on top before serving.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable pudding as it cools.
Strawberries
Add fruit flavour and texture to the set gelatine.
Eggs
Thicken the milk into a custard and, as whites, give the frosting its light froth.
Milk
Forms the body of the custard that is poured over the gelatine.
Sugar
Sweetens both the gelatine layer and the custard.

The step that matters

Heating the milk and eggs until thickened. Eggs thicken when heated gently, but too much heat scrambles them into lumps. Stir steadily and stop once the custard coats a spoon.

“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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