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Dessert

Arrow-Root Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with arrowroot, milk, egg yolks, sugar, butter, and nutmeg.

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 ↓

Arrow-Root Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Take ⅓ cup of new milk and mix it with ⅓ cup of arrow-root.

  2. Boil the remaining milk and stir it into the arrow-root mixture.

  3. When nearly cold, add the well-beaten yolks of 4 eggs, 2 ounces of pounded sugar, and 2 ounces of butter. Season with grated nutmeg and mix well.

Bake

  1. Bake in a buttered dish for 15 to 20 minutes.

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. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Arrow-root
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding texture when heated.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard, adding richness and help it set when baked.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich, tender texture and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and eggs.

The step that matters

Adding the yolks when nearly cold. If the thickened milk is still very hot, it can scramble the egg yolks, leaving bits of cooked egg in the pudding. Letting it cool slightly first keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

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