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Dessert

Gold and Silver Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, flour, eggs, sugar, and lemon flavoring, baked and topped with a stiff egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gold and Silver Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, mix the remaining milk with 6 tablespoons of flour and a little salt.

  3. Combine the hot milk with the flour mixture and let it cool.

  4. Once cool, stir in the beaten yolks of 6 eggs.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

Top and serve

  1. Beat the whites of 6 eggs with ½ cup of sugar until very stiff.

  2. Flavor the icing with lemon.

  3. Serve the pudding 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 thickens and sets with the eggs.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the custard holds its shape.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the custard; whites beaten stiff give the light topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the topping and helps keep the beaten whites stable.

The step that matters

Let the milk mixture cool before adding the yolks. Stirring egg yolks into very hot liquid can scramble them, leaving lumps. Cooling the mixture first lets the yolks blend smoothly and set evenly in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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