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Dessert

Sago Pudding

A sweet pudding made from sago pearls cooked in milk, eggs, and sugar, baked until puffed.

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

Sago Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the sago base

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Wash and add the sago and salt to the milk; cook until transparent, stirring often.

  3. Beat the eggs with the sugar.

  4. Remove the sago from the stove; add the eggs and sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered pudding dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes or until puffed up.

  2. Serve hot or cold 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Sago
Swells in the hot milk and thickens the pudding into a soft, tender body.
Eggs
Set during baking to give structure and help the pudding puff up.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the sago cooks in, giving the pudding its creamy moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning at the pudding's surface in the oven.

The step that matters

Add the eggs off the heat. Adding beaten eggs to very hot sago can scramble them and leave lumps. Removing the pan from the stove first lets the eggs blend smoothly into the custard base before baking.

“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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