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Dessert

Delicate Pudding

A lemon pudding made with corn starch, sugar, and custard of egg yolks and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Delicate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix corn starch with a little cold water and sugar.

  2. Add lemon juice and rind.

  3. Add boiling water.

  4. Let boil for a few minutes.

  5. Whisk in beaten egg whites.

  6. Pour mixture into a mold to cool.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Beat egg yolks with a little milk and sugar.

  2. Add mixture to boiling milk.

  3. Turn out the pudding.

  4. Pour custard around the pudding.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Corn starch
Thickens the lemon mixture into a soft, set pudding as it boils.
Egg whites
Whisked in to add lightness and help the pudding set with a airy texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a smooth custard that is poured around the pudding.
Lemon
Provides the tart, aromatic flavor of the juice and rind.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture to the boiling milk. If the milk is added too hot or stirred poorly, the egg yolks can scramble and curdle instead of thickening smoothly into a custard. Adding the mixture gradually and stirring keeps it smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, sugar, egg, milk. 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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