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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A baked chocolate custard made with milk, chocolate, eggs, and sugar, topped with a frothy sugar‑sweetened egg white frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Wet the grated chocolate with cold milk, then stir it into the scalded milk until dissolved.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  4. Add the beaten egg yolks and sugar, mixing well.

  5. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for about 45 minutes.

Frost and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add the sugar for frosting.

  2. Spread the frosting over the pudding and return it to the oven until lightly browned.

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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the custard sets in.
Chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and colour of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken and set the pudding as it bakes.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms the light topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue topping brown.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Whites under-beaten or deflated will not hold a foam, so the frosting turns runny and sinks into the pudding instead of sitting on top and browning.

“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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