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Flour Hasty Pudding

A simple milk and flour pudding cooked until thick, served with butter and sugar or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Flour Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat the milk in a pot until boiling.

  2. Add salt and stir in the flour mixed with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. Boil and stir for 15 minutes.

  4. Add the butter and cook for 2 more minutes.

  5. Pour into a deep dish.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter and sugar or cream and sugar.

  2. Sprinkle each serving with nutmeg.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding as it boils.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture in smoothly and keep stirring while boiling. Flour added to hot liquid can clump; mixing it first with cold milk and stirring constantly keeps it smooth. Boiling and stirring for the full time cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the starch thicken the milk properly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, 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.

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