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Dessert

Danish Pudding

A custard pudding with caramelized brown sugar topping, baked in a water bath and served with sweetened whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Danish Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs until light and mix in the white sugar.

  2. Boil the cream and milk, then pour it over the egg mixture.

  3. Flavor with vanilla and return to a double boiler, stirring constantly until the brown sugar is caramelized.

Make the caramel

  1. In a frying pan, melt the brown sugar until it becomes syrup.

  2. Pour the syrup into a greased baking pan and set it in a pan of boiling water.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the custard over the caramel in the baking pan and bake like a custard.

  2. Serve the pudding the next day topped with sweetened 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its structure.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard base.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, making the custard smooth and creamy.
Milk
Adds liquid that keeps the custard tender and less dense.
Brown sugar
Melts into a caramel layer that sweetens and flavors the pudding.

The step that matters

Melting the brown sugar to syrup. Sugar can scorch quickly and turn bitter before it looks dark. Watch it closely and remove it from the heat once it is a smooth, fluid syrup, because sugar keeps darkening from residual heat in the pan.

“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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