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Dessert

Cream Pudding

A custard-like dessert baked with cream, sugar, eggs, coconut or nutmeg, and a crumb crust.

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

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grease a pie plate and sprinkle with stale bread crumbs to form a crust.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, stir together the cream, sugar, egg yolks, and grated coconut or nutmeg.

  2. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the cream mixture into the pie plate.

  2. Sprinkle a layer of bread crumbs on top.

  3. Bake until set and lightly browned.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 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. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides richness and fat, giving the pudding a smooth, tender texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help it set into a custard when baked.
Egg whites
Beaten into the mixture to add lightness and help it rise and hold structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and aids browning on the surface.
Stale bread crumbs
Form a crust underneath and a layer on top, adding a light, dry texture.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding rather than stirring keeps the air in the whipped whites, so the pudding stays light instead of deflating and becoming dense.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, egg, bread, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, bread, butter. 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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