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Dessert

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

A quick pudding made by mixing egg and flour, then cooking in boiling milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the egg with enough flour to moisten it.

  2. Rub the mixture between your hands until it forms small dry lumps, like bread crumbs.

  3. Stir the lumps into the boiling milk.

  4. Beat over the fire until the pudding is thick and smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve with treacle, butter, sugar, or 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides structure and body as it thickens the milk into a set pudding.
Flour
Thickens the pudding and forms the dry lumps that are stirred into the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the lumps into the boiling milk. Adding the moistened lumps to boiling milk and beating them in helps them dissolve evenly and thicken smoothly, instead of leaving stiff, lumpy bits in the pudding.

“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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