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Dessert

Minute Pudding

A quick milk and flour pudding cooked in a double boiler, served with optional cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Minute Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Grease a double boiler or saucepan with a little butter.

  2. Heat 1 quart of milk in the greased vessel until boiling.

  3. Sift in 2 small cups of flour gradually, stirring briskly to avoid lumps.

  4. Just before removing from heat, stir in 2 well-beaten eggs and mix briefly.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately with cream and sugar if desired.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells, giving the pudding body.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the pudding when stirred in while hot.

The step that matters

Sifting in the flour gradually while stirring briskly. Flour dropped in quickly clumps as its outer layer hydrates before the inside does, leaving lumps. Adding it slowly while stirring disperses each particle so the starch thickens the milk evenly.

“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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