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Dessert

Delmonico Pudding

A coconut milk pudding made with eggs, sugar, corn starch, and topped with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Delmonico Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Wet the corn-starch in cold milk.

  3. Beat the eggs and sugar together, then stir into the scalding milk.

  4. Add the coconut and pour into a pudding dish.

Top and bake

  1. Whip the reserved egg whites with 3 tablespoons of sugar until stiff, flavor with lemon or vanilla, and spread over the pudding.

  2. Bake until light brown.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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 + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs and corn-starch thicken into custard.
Eggs
Set the custard as they heat, and the whipped whites give the topping its airy structure.
Corn-starch
Thickens the hot milk so the custard holds its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the whipped whites stay stiff.
Shredded coconut
Adds flavor and a chewy texture to the custard.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites until stiff. Whipping traps air in the egg white foam, which gives the topping its light lift. Under-whipped whites stay runny and sink into the custard, while the sugar helps the foam hold its shape in the oven.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Peachfits less well

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