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Dessert

Spanish Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with milk, eggs, sugar, gelatin, and a pinch of salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Spanish Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in a little milk while heating.

  2. In a bowl, add 1 cup of sugar to the beaten yolks and mix with the boiling milk.

  3. Add the remaining cup of sugar to the beaten whites and stir into the milk, stirring constantly.

  4. Pour the mixture into molds immediately and let it stand overnight.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid milk mixture into a firm, sliceable pudding as it cools.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and thicken the custard, while whites add a light, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the beaten egg whites.
Milk
Forms the main liquid base that the gelatine sets and the eggs enrich.

The step that matters

Stirring the whites into the hot milk. Adding the beaten whites to the milk while stirring constantly keeps them distributed and prevents the mixture from separating or curdling unevenly. Pouring the mixture into molds immediately helps it set before the foam collapses.

“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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