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Dessert

Saratoga Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with corn starch, milk, sugar, eggs, butter, and wine, baked and served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Saratoga Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix corn starch in cold milk and stir until it boils.

  2. When cool, stir in white sugar and beaten egg whites and yolks.

  3. Pour mixture into a large pudding dish and place in a pan of water.

  4. Bake for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, cream together sugar and butter.

  2. Add egg yolks and half the wine.

  3. Place the dish in boiling water.

  4. Stir for 10 minutes.

  5. Add the rest of the wine.

  6. Serve.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a set custard base as it boils.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the pudding as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the creamed sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding and to the creamed sauce.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce over boiling water. Stirring the sauce while it heats over boiling water gently warms the egg yolks, thickening the sauce without scrambling them. Heating too fast or unevenly can curdle the eggs, so keep the stirring steady for the full time.

“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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