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Dessert

Kiss Pudding

A sweet milk pudding thickened with corn starch, sugar, and egg yolks, topped with whipped egg whites and browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Kiss 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. Boil the sweet milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix corn starch with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. Stir the corn starch mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Add sugar and egg yolks, stirring continuously, and let it boil for a few minutes.

Top and brown

  1. Whip the egg whites with a little additional sugar until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread the whipped egg whites over the pudding and brown in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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

Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch and yolks set into a custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it boils, giving the pudding a smooth, sliceable body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the custard as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the topping brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Add sugar and egg yolks, stirring continuously, and let it boil for a few minutes.. Egg yolks can scramble or curdle if they get too hot too fast, so constant stirring spreads the heat evenly. The starch also needs to reach a full boil to thicken properly.

“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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