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Dessert

Custard Pudding Without Eggs

A custard pudding made without eggs, using custard powder, milk, butter, and sugar, baked and topped with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Custard Pudding Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix the flour and custard powder with a few tablespoons of milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. In a saucepan, boil the remaining milk with the sugar and butter.

  3. Once boiling, pour the milk mixture into the flour and custard paste, stirring briskly.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pie dish and bake until slightly browned.

  2. Before serving, decorate the top with apricot jam or your choice of jam.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + apricottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 custard and helps it set into a stable, sliceable texture.
Custard powder
Thickens the milk and gives the pudding its custard flavour and smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the custard.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances its flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the hot milk into the paste. Pouring the boiling milk in while stirring briskly disperses the flour and custard powder evenly, so the starch hydrates smoothly without lumps and thickens uniformly as it heats.

Swap the apricot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, 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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