Name: Invalid Cup Pudding
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon flour; 1 egg; ½ cup cold milk; ¼ teaspoon salt

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 ↓

Invalid Cup Pudding

Ingredients

1 tablespoon flour
1 egg
½ cup cold milk
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

Make the batter

In a bowl, mix flour, egg, cold milk, and salt to form a batter.
Pour the batter into a buttered cup.

Cook and serve

Boil for 15 minutes.
Serve with sauce, fruit, or plain sugar.

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.

Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together88,785 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 liquid batter and gives the pudding its body.
Egg: Binds the batter and sets with heat to give the pudding structure.
Cold milk: Provides the liquid that turns the batter into a moist, tender pudding.

“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.