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Dessert

Delicate Pudding

A light custard pudding topped with whipped egg whites, currant jelly, and blanched almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Delicate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Stir in the flour, milk, baking powder, and well-beaten eggs.

  3. Boil in a mold for 30 minutes.

Assemble and decorate

  1. Place the pudding in a dish.

  2. Pour a custard made from the yolks of 2 eggs, 1 pint of milk, and sugar to taste around the pudding.

  3. Whip the egg whites with the powdered sugar until stiff.

  4. Drop the whipped egg whites on the custard to form nests.

  5. Place a bit of currant jelly in each nest.

  6. Blanch the almonds and stick them on top of the pudding.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the pudding a rich, tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding once it is set by heat.
Eggs
Bind the batter and, as whipped whites, add lightness to the topping nests.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and forms the base of the custard.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten until they hold firm peaks, and any trace of yolk or grease will stop them whipping well. Stiff whites hold their nest shape on the custard instead of collapsing.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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