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Dessert

A Souffle Pudding

A sweet pudding made with milk, eggs, sugar, sponge cakes, and served with wine sauce.

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 Souffle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a quart mold with butter and line it with raisins.

  2. Cut the sponge cakes into pieces and place them in the mold.

Make the custard

  1. Whisk the eggs until the yolks are broken.

  2. Pour the boiling milk over the eggs and add enough sugar to sweeten.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve into the mold.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the mold and boil it.

  2. Serve hot with wine sauce.

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. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Set the custard and give the pudding its light, firm structure as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the eggs set into a soft custard.
Sponge cakes
Absorb the custard and hold the pudding together as a soft, tender body.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard so it tastes balanced against the wine sauce.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling milk over the eggs. Adding hot milk gradually while whisking warms the eggs without scrambling them, so the custard stays smooth and sets evenly.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

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