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Dessert

Caramel Pudding

A sweet pudding made with caramelized sugar, milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Caramel Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Brown the sugar in a pan.

  2. Boil the milk.

Make the pudding

  1. Stir the burnt sugar into the milk until smooth.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold milk, then add to the mixture.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a mold and let it 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells and sets the pudding's body when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the caramel flavors.
Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and a caramel flavor and color when browned.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes. Starch from the flour only thickens fully once the mixture reaches a boil and is held there. Stirring keeps it smooth and prevents scorching on the bottom of the pan.

“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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