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Dessert

Arrowroot Pudding

A baked dessert made from arrowroot, milk, sugar, eggs, and spices, served in a pastry-lined dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Arrowroot Pudding

Why it works: Milk and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,346 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Arrowroot 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.

Prepare the custard

  1. Mix the arrowroot with 2 cups of cold milk.

  2. Pour the mixture into 1 pint of boiling milk and dissolve the sugar.

  3. Stir constantly and add the mace or other spice.

  4. Beat in the eggs until well combined.

Bake

  1. Line a dish with pastry and pour in the mixture.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  2. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  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. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, set custard as it cooks.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding structure and body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavour of the milk and spice.
Milk
Forms the main liquid base that the custard is built on.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while adding the arrowroot mixture to the boiling milk. Arrowroot thickens as it heats and can form lumps if not stirred, so constant stirring keeps the custard smooth and evenly thickened before it goes into the crust.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, milk, 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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