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Dessert

Delicate Pudding

A light, butter‑based pudding made with flour, milk, baking powder, eggs, crumbs, and sugar, baked until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Delicate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook in the hot milk, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens.

  3. Beat the eggs and add the sugar, then stir into the hot mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Stir in the crumbs and pour into individual molds that are buttered and dredged with sugar.

  2. Bake until firm.

  3. Serve with orange or lemon 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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the batter.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk and gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the flour thickens and keeps the pudding moist.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lighten the pudding as it bakes.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding its firm structure.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the hot milk. Flour must be stirred constantly while it cooks in the hot milk, or it clumps and the starch will not thicken the mixture evenly.

“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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