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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A chocolate custard made by boiling milk, mixing with chocolate, eggs, vanilla, and sugar, then baking and topping with browned egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk.

  2. Grate 1.5 ounces of chocolate and mix with a little cold milk and water.

  3. Stir the boiled milk into the chocolate and set aside to cool.

  4. Stir in the beaten yolks of 6 eggs and flavor with vanilla.

  5. Sweeten to taste and bake until the consistency of custard.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the whites of the eggs with 6 tablespoons of sugar, spread over the pudding, and brown.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set during baking.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar, they form a light topping that browns over the pudding.
Chocolate
Gives the pudding its main flavor and deep color.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs set into a custard.

The step that matters

Bake until the consistency of custard. Egg proteins set as they heat, so underbaking leaves the pudding runny while overbaking can make it grainy or curdled.

“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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