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Dessert

Farina Pudding

A sweet pudding made with farina, milk, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Farina Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Grease a pudding dish with butter and dust it with flour.

Make the custard

  1. Mix the farina with the melted butter, then add the boiling milk and cook until thick.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add the yolks of the eggs, sugar, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites until well combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the pudding mixture into the prepared dish.

  2. Place the dish in a pan of boiling water and bake for 1 hour.

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. 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Egg yolks enrich the mixture and whites, folded in, lighten its texture as it sets.
Farina
Cooked in hot milk, it thickens the mixture into a soft, set body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a tender, smooth texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the farina thickens and the eggs set into.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its soft, tender texture.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only if they are beaten well and folded gently. Overmixing deflates them, leaving the pudding dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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