Skip to main content
Dessert

Fairy Pudding

A sweet custard-like pudding made with milk, sugar, butter, egg yolks, flour, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fairy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk in a pot.

  2. In a bowl, cream together 1 cup of sugar and ¾ cup of butter.

  3. Add 12 well-beaten egg yolks to the creamed mixture.

  4. Stir in a heaping cup of flour and mix well.

  5. Slowly add the mixture to the boiling milk, stirring continuously.

Bake and serve

  1. Beat the 12 egg whites until frothy and fold them into the mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and place it in a pan of boiling water.

  3. Bake carefully until 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.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the pudding, giving it a soft, custardy body when set.
Egg yolks
Provide richness and help the pudding set into a tender custard.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add lightness and airy rise to the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds its shape rather than running loose.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich texture and a smooth, tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the creamed base.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Whites hold air only when whipped to frothy peaks; vigorous stirring deflates them, losing the light rise the pudding depends on.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes