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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A chocolate pudding made with grated chocolate, milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla, baked and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the grated chocolate and milk together, then let it cool.

  2. Beat the egg yolks and add the sugar and vanilla extract.

  3. Combine the cooled chocolate mixture with the egg yolk mixture.

  4. Bake in a pudding dish at 300°F (150°C) until set.

Top with meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add sugar and spread over the top.

  2. Return to the oven to slightly brown the meringue.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they set, while whites whip into a meringue topping.
Grated chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavor and body of the pudding base.
Whole milk
Forms the liquid base that the chocolate melts into and the eggs set within.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilize the beaten egg whites in the meringue.

The step that matters

Baking the pudding until set. Egg proteins set gently as the custard heats. Overbaking at 300°F can make the pudding curdled, grainy, or watery, so check for a just-set center.

“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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