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Dessert

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

A simple egg and flour pudding thickened with milk, served with butter, sugar, and optional rich cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flour lumps

  1. Beat the egg until very light.

  2. Add enough flour to moisten the egg.

  3. Rub the mixture through your hands until it forms fine dry lumps like bread crumbs.

Make the pudding

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a pot.

  2. Stir in enough of the flour mixture to thicken the milk.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter, sugar, and rich cream if available.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg
Beaten egg binds the flour into dry lumps and adds richness to the pudding.
Flour
Starch in the flour lumps thickens the hot milk into a pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour mixture thickens into pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour mixture. Starch needs to be stirred into hot milk gradually and evenly, or it clumps instead of thickening smoothly. Keep stirring so the lumps disperse and the milk thickens uniformly.

“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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