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Dessert

Dandy Pudding

A custard pudding made with milk, eggs, corn starch, sugar, vanilla, topped with stiffened egg whites and powdered sugar.

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

Dandy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Moisten the corn starch with a little cold milk, then add it to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until light, then add to the boiling milk.

  5. Remove from heat, add the vanilla, and pour into a baking dish.

Top and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites until very stiff, then add the powdered sugar and heap on top of the pudding.

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. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and enrich it, while whites whip into the stiff meringue topping.
Corn starch
Gelatinizes when boiled with the milk, thickening the custard to a pudding set.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the starch and egg yolks thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the beaten egg yolks become light and smooth.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue and dissolves readily into the stiffly beaten egg whites.

The step that matters

Boiling the starch-thickened milk. Corn starch only thickens fully once it has been boiled with the liquid, so the mixture must be kept boiling for the full five minutes. Stopping early leaves the custard thin and loose.

“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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