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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A milk-based pudding thickened with corn starch and chocolate, served with cream or butter‑sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 pudding

  1. Scald the milk over boiling water.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little scalded milk.

  3. Before it thickens, add the chocolate dissolved in boiling water.

  4. Stir until sufficiently cooked.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream or a sauce made of butter and sugar stirred to a cream.

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. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

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

  4. Corn + chocolatetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens.
Chocolate
Gives the pudding its flavour and colour.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Add the chocolate before the starch sets. Cornstarch thickens as it heats, so the chocolate must be stirred in before the mixture thickens. Once thick, lumps are hard to smooth out, and the chocolate may not blend 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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