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Vermicelli Pudding

A sweet milk pudding made with vermicelli, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Vermicelli Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk with lemon peel and cinnamon until hot.

  2. Sweeten with loaf sugar and strain through a sieve.

  3. Add the vermicelli and boil for 10 minutes.

Set and bake

  1. Mix in the yolks of 5 eggs and the whites of 3 eggs until well combined.

  2. Steam for 1 hour.

  3. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Vermicelli
Provides the starchy body that thickens the milk and gives the pudding its structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender, creamy texture.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift as they set with heat, helping the pudding hold together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the vermicelli cooks in and the eggs set within.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the richness of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Mixing in the eggs. Egg yolks and whites should be fully combined into the warm mixture so they set evenly. Eggs added to a very hot or unevenly mixed base can scramble or leave streaks, and heat set too fast or too hard makes the pudding grainy or rubbery.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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