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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A pudding made by soaking cake in wine, then pouring a custard of milk, eggs, and potato flour over it, baked and topped with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Hasty 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.

Prepare the cake

  1. Dip the cake slices in wine or sprinkle wine over them.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk and egg yolks.

  2. Add potato flour.

  3. Sweeten to taste.

  4. Boil the custard mixture.

  5. Flavor it.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour it over the cake in a pudding dish.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add sugar.

  3. Spread over the pudding.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until slightly browned.

Serve

  1. Serve cold.

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 + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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, and whipped whites lighten the topping so it sets with a soft structure.
Potato flour
Starch thickens the milk custard so it holds together rather than staying liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which sets as the egg proteins cook.
Old cake
Soaks up the wine and custard, providing the body of the pudding.
Wine
Softens the cake and adds a light acidic, aromatic flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the custard mixture. The custard must be cooked enough for the starch to thicken and the egg yolks to set; undercooking leaves it runny, while overheating can curdle the eggs.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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