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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A chocolate pudding made by boiling chocolate, sugar, and water into a syrup, then adding milk and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine chocolate, sugar, and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until it forms a syrup.

Thicken and cool

  1. Add milk and corn starch to the syrup, stirring well.

  2. Flavor as desired and allow to cool before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + corntop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Chocolate
Provides the main flavor and richness of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps dissolve the chocolate into a syrup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the pudding sets from.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid as its starch granules swell and gelatinize when heated.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch and milk. Stir well as the milk and corn starch go into the syrup. Starch clumps if it is not evenly dispersed, and it only thickens fully once the mixture is heated while being stirred, so lumps are hard to fix later.

“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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