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Dessert

Orange Pudding

A custard pudding made with oranges, milk, sugar, corn starch, eggs, and frosted with beaten egg whites.

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 ↓

Orange Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel, seed, and cut the oranges into small pieces.

  2. Add sugar to the oranges and let it stand.

Make the custard

  1. Stir corn-starch mixed with a little water and the egg yolks into nearly boiling milk.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Mix the cooled mixture with the oranges.

Frost and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites and add ½ cup sugar to make a frosting.

  2. Spread the frosting over the pudding.

  3. Place the pudding in the oven for a few minutes to brown.

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. Orange + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Oranges
Provide the main fruit flavour and moisture in the pudding.
Corn-starch
Thickens the milk mixture so the pudding sets softly.
Egg yolks
Enrich and help thicken the milk custard.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a light frosting that browns in the oven.
Milk
Forms the custard base that the other ingredients thicken.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch and yolks into the hot milk. Cornstarch thickens only when heated, and yolks can scramble if added to very hot milk without stirring. Keep stirring steadily so the custard thickens smoothly without lumps or curdling.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, corn, 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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