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Dessert

Peetty Pudding

A custard pudding topped with meringue and jelly, made with flour, milk, eggs, sugar, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Peetty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Wet the flour with cold milk in a bowl.

  2. Beat the egg yolks and mix with the flour and sugar.

  3. In a kettle, heat the quart of milk in boiling water until it reaches boiling point.

  4. Stir in the flour mixture and flavoring until it begins to thicken, then remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  5. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish or cups.

Top and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, then add the sugar and drop spoonfuls on top of the custard.

  2. Place a small spoonful of jelly in the center of each meringue round.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set with the milk.
Egg whites
Whip into stiff peaks to form the light meringue topping.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the custard holds its shape.
Milk
Forms the body of the custard and supplies moisture.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour mixture while the milk is hot. Stir steadily as the mixture thickens. Starch granules swell when heated in liquid, and uneven heating or stopping too early can leave lumps or a thin custard.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, sugar, vanilla):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, sugar, vanilla. 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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