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Dessert

Farina Pudding

A pudding made with farina, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and almonds, boiled and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Farina Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a pot, add farina to boiling milk and cook for 7-8 minutes.

  2. In a bowl, rub together butter and sugar.

  3. Add egg yolks and blanched almonds to the butter mixture.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with your choice of pudding sauce.

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 + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Farina
Thickens the milk as its starch swells and sets, giving the pudding its body.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they trap air that lightens the pudding and helps it rise.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the pudding as they set during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the farina cooks in, creating a soft, moist base.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the whipped whites. Stirring hard deflates them, so the pudding comes out denser and less light.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Cocoafits less well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, 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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