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Dessert

Caramel Pudding

A sweet pudding made from brown sugar, cornstarch, and water, optionally topped with nuts and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Caramel Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel custard

  1. Melt the brown sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water.

  3. Add the dissolved cornstarch to the melted sugar and stir in the boiling water.

  4. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

Set and serve

  1. Add nuts if desired and pour the mixture into a mold.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Melts to form the caramel flavour and gives the pudding its sweetness and colour.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the pudding its set body.

The step that matters

Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture reaches a boil and is kept moving. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would leave a grainy or burnt-tasting pudding.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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