Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Caramel Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Make the custard
Boil the milk in a saucepan.
In a separate bowl, moisten the cornstarch with a little milk.
Once the milk is boiling, add the moistened cornstarch and stir quickly.
Caramelize and set
In a tin pie dish, boil and scorch the brown sugar until it caramelizes.
Pour the caramelized sugar into the cornstarch mixture and stir quickly.
Pour the mixture into a mold.
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.
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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
- Milk
- Forms the liquid base of the pudding that thickens when heated.
- Cornstarch
- Thickens the milk as it heats, setting the pudding into a soft, sliceable texture.
- Brown sugar
- Caramelizes to give the pudding its deep, toasty sweetness and colour.
The step that matters
Adding the moistened cornstarch to boiling milk. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold or warm liquid first, then added to boiling milk and stirred quickly; otherwise it clumps and never thickens smoothly. Starch granules swell and gelatinize once heated, so constant stirring keeps the mixture even.
“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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