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Dessert

Kiss Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with eggs, sugar, corn starch, and milk, topped with browned meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Kiss Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with ½ cup sugar until light.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon corn starch and stir in 1 pint of boiling milk.

  3. Cook on the stove until thick, then pour into a pudding dish.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites with ½ cup sugar until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread the egg white mixture over the top and brown in the oven.

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

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they cook, and whites whip into the sweet meringue topping.
Corn starch
Swells with heat in the hot milk, thickening the custard so it holds its shape.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the starch and yolks thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, when beaten into whites, helps stabilise the meringue.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until thick. Corn starch only thickens fully once the mixture is hot enough to swell its granules. Stopping early leaves a thin, runny custard that will not set well under the topping.

“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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