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Dessert

Minute Pudding

A quick milk pudding thickened with flour, served with sweetened cream and optional berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Minute Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter the bottom and sides of a granite saucepan.

Make the pudding

  1. Pour in 1 quart of sweet milk and add ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil.

  3. Sift in white or graham flour, a handful at a time, until the mixture is smooth and thick.

Serve

  1. Transfer the pudding to a dish that has been dipped in water.

  2. Serve with sweetened cream and add berries if desired.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 flour thickens into a smooth pudding.
White or graham flour
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells, giving the pudding body.

The step that matters

Sifting in the flour. Adding flour too fast into hot milk can form lumps that do not smooth out. Adding it a handful at a time and stirring lets the starch disperse evenly, so the pudding becomes smooth and thick.

“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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