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Dessert

Delmonico Pudding

A custard pudding made with milk, corn starch, sugar, egg yolks, egg whites, and vanilla, baked and browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Delmonico Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix corn starch with a little cold water, then stir into boiling milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix 6 tablespoons of sugar with the yolks of 5 eggs and pour into the starch mixture.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a pudding dish and bake.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the whites of 5 eggs with 6 tablespoons of sugar and flavor with vanilla.

  2. Drop the egg white mixture onto the pudding and brown slightly in the oven.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and vanilla 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch and egg yolks thicken into a custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable custard as it heats.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and add richness and body as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Beaten with sugar, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and stabilizes the beaten egg white topping.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into boiling milk. Cornstarch must be fully heated in liquid to swell and thicken. Adding it to hot milk while stirring helps prevent lumps and keeps the custard smooth.

“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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