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Dessert

Cream Pudding

A baked custard made with milk, butter, sugar, nutmeg, egg yolks, and folded egg whites, topped with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Cream Pudding

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan with the milk.

  2. Stir in the sugar and grated nutmeg.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and mix well.

  4. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and gently fold them into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter a shallow pudding dish and sprinkle it with bread crumbs.

  2. Pour the mixture into the dish and sprinkle the top with more bread crumbs.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until the center is set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and whites, whipped and folded in, lighten its texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and gives it a soft, creamy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the custard.

The step that matters

Fold the whipped egg whites gently. Deflating the whites by stirring or overmixing loses the air that lightens the pudding, so it bakes up denser and less airy.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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