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Dessert

A Fine Plain Baked Pudding

A baked milk pudding with puff pastry covering, made from milk, flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and bay leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

A Fine Plain Baked Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk with bay leaves.

  2. Mix in flour and salt to create a thick batter.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in butter and sugar.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and half the egg whites, then mix into the batter.

Bake

  1. Cover a baking dish with puff pastry and pour in the mixture.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 30 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a stiff batter that holds the pudding together.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the custard.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the custard set as it bakes.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding rise and hold its structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown slightly in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and gives it body.

The step that matters

Mix the egg yolks and whites into the batter. Adding hot batter too fast or before it cools can scramble the egg yolks, leaving lumps. Let the batter cool slightly and whisk the eggs in gradually for a smooth custard.

“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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