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Dessert

Florentine Pudding

A custard pudding made with eggs, corn starch, sugar, and milk, folded with beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Florentine Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in the cold milk.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the egg yolks, sugar, and dissolved corn starch to make a boiled custard.

Finish the pudding

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add 1 tablespoon of sugar.

  2. Fold the beaten egg whites into the custard mixture.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard, and whites trap air to give the pudding a light texture.
Corn starch
Swells in hot liquid and thickens the custard so it holds its shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilize the beaten egg whites.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch and eggs thicken into custard.

The step that matters

Fold the beaten egg whites into the custard mixture. Beaten whites hold air in a fragile protein foam. Stirring vigorously or overmixing deflates them, so the pudding turns dense instead of light. Fold gently with a spatula, cutting through and turning the mixture over.

“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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