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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A quick almond milk pudding made with bitter almonds, lemon peel, bay leaves, eggs, flour, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk with bitter almonds, lemon peel, and bay leaves, adding a little salt.

  2. Remove the leaves and let the milk cool.

  3. Beat the eggs and add them to the cooled milk.

Thicken and finish

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, sprinkling in flour through a sieve while stirring to avoid lumps.

  2. Sweeten to taste and strain 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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flavours infuse into and the eggs and flour thicken.
Eggs
Set on heating to give the pudding body and a creamy, custard-like texture.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it boils, giving the pudding its body.
Bitter almonds
Contribute the characteristic almond aroma that flavours the milk.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, adjusted to taste at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the boiling mixture. Flour dropped in unsifted or too fast clumps into lumps that do not disperse. Sifting it in slowly while stirring spreads the starch evenly so it thickens smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, almond, egg, flour, 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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