Skip to main content
Dessert

Maple Pudding

A sweet pudding made from water, brown sugar, cornstarch, and served with cream and nuts.

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

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Maple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine 3 cups of water and 2 cups of brown sugar in a pot.

  2. Heat until almost boiling.

  3. Dissolve 3 tablespoons of cornstarch in 1 cup of cold water, then add to the pot.

  4. Boil the mixture until it becomes clear.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding warm with cream and chopped nuts.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and a deep caramel flavour, and helps give the pudding its body.
Cornstarch
Swells in hot liquid and thickens the mixture into a smooth, sliceable pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it becomes clear. Cornstarch only thickens fully once it reaches a boil. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and cloudy, and it can taste starchy.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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.

More maple pudding recipes

Sauce 5Frozen 4 See all 8 →

You might also like

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