Skip to main content
Dessert

Delicious Pudding

A vanilla gelatin pudding made with milk, egg yolks, gelatin, sugar, and vanilla, served chilled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Delicious Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan and stir in the egg yolks.

  2. Add the gelatin and sweeten to taste, boiling until thickened like custard.

  3. Remove from heat and gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Chill and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into molds and refrigerate until cold.

  2. Serve with 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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  4. Vanilla + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the sweetness and vanilla and gives the pudding its body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they heat and add richness and a smooth, custard-like texture.
Gelatin
Sets the liquid as it cools, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.

The step that matters

Thicken gently without boiling hard. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the mixture boils hard or overheats, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy, so the custard must be stirred and watched closely while it thickens.

“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 gelatin pudding recipes

You might also like