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Dessert

Minute Pudding

A quick milk pudding thickened with wheat flour and served with sweetened cream and optional berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Minute Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a pot, combine the sweet milk (or water and milk) with a pinch of salt and bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in wheat flour until the mixture thickens to the consistency of cornmeal mush.

Serve

  1. Remove from heat and serve immediately with sweetened cream flavored with nutmeg.

  2. Optionally, add fresh or canned blackberries, raspberries, or cherries 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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together359 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Thickens the milk into a soft mush as its starch swells when heated.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring in the wheat flour. Flour added to hot liquid can clump if not stirred in steadily. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly into a smooth mush.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, wheat, flour, cream):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Turmericfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, wheat, flour, cream. 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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