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Dessert

Kiss Pudding

A milk and corn starch pudding topped with a frothy egg white frosting, coconut, and lemon flavor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Kiss Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a pot, combine half a quart of milk with salt and sugar, and bring to a boil.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in the remaining half quart of milk and stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the egg yolks and mix well.

Make the frosting

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add half a cup of sugar and flavor with lemon.

Finish and serve

  1. Cover the pudding with the frosting and brown it nicely in the oven.

  2. Save a little frosting to moisten the top, then sprinkle grated coconut over it.

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 + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  5. Coconut + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 starch and yolks thicken into a custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the hot milk into a smooth, sliceable pudding as it gelatinizes.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the custard as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the frosting its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and frosting and helps the frosting brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stir the starch into the boiling milk. Starch dissolved in cold milk first spreads evenly instead of clumping. Stirring while it boils keeps the custard smooth as the starch swells and thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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