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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A thickened milk dessert made with chocolate, corn starch, eggs, sugar, and salt, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the chocolate until melted.

  3. Dissolve the corn starch in a little water.

  4. Add the dissolved mixture to the milk.

  5. Beat the eggs.

  6. Mix the beaten eggs into the milk mixture along with the sugar and salt.

  7. Cook until thickened.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture as it heats, giving the pudding its body.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Chocolate
Gives the pudding its chocolate flavor and color.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch and eggs thicken.

The step that matters

Cook until thickened. Cornstarch only thickens once the mixture reaches a boil and is stirred, so stopping too early leaves the pudding thin. Egg proteins can also scramble if the mixture overheats, so heat gently while stirring.

“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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