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Minute Pudding

A quick milk pudding flavored with lemon, served cold with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Minute Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk in a pot until it boils.

  2. In a small bowl, mix 3 tablespoons of flour with a little cold milk to form a paste.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling milk and stir briskly until it thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in 1 teaspoon of extract of lemon.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool.

  2. Serve cold with cream and sugar.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth pudding as its starch swells when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy pudding.
Extract of lemon
Adds bright lemon aroma to the mild, creamy pudding.

The step that matters

Stir briskly as the mixture boils and thickens. Flour lumps form if the paste is added without constant stirring, because starch granules clump before they can disperse evenly. Steady stirring keeps the thickening smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, cream, sugar. 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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