Name: Chocolate Pudding
Ingredients: 1 cup bread crumbs; 1 cup milk; ½ cake chocolate, dissolved; 2 eggs; 3 tablespoons sugar; Butter for greasing

Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs in a bowl.
Add the dissolved chocolate, eggs, and sugar to the mixture and stir well.
Butter a mold generously and pour the mixture into it.

Steam and serve

Steam the pudding for 1.5 hours.
Serve with 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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,404 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,128 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs: Soak up the hot milk to form a soft, moist body for the pudding.
Eggs: Bind the mixture and set as it steams, giving the pudding structure.
Milk: Softens the bread crumbs and adds moisture to the custard-like texture.
Chocolate: Provides the main flavor and darkens the pudding.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.

“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.