Skip to main content
Dessert

Gold and Silver Pudding

A milk and egg pudding flavored with lemon, baked and topped with a stiff egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. In a pot, heat ½ quart of milk until boiling.

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

  3. Combine the boiling milk with the flour mixture.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then stir in the beaten yolks of 6 eggs.

Bake and ice

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

  2. For the icing, beat the whites of 6 eggs with ½ cup of sugar until very stiff. Flavor the icing with lemon.

  3. Serve 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set custard.
Egg yolks
Enriches and sets the custard as it bakes.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a stiff, airy icing.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps stabilize the whipped whites.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until very stiff. Whites must be beaten until they hold firm peaks; under-beaten whites collapse and make the icing runny, while any trace of yolk or grease prevents them from whipping to full volume.

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes