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Dessert

A Hasty Pudding

A simple milk pudding thickened with flour and egg yolks, flavored with bay leaves.

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 ↓

A Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, bring the milk and bay leaves to a boil.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the salt and a few spoonfuls of milk.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk.

Make the pudding

  1. Gradually add flour while stirring until the mixture thickens, but not too thick.

  2. Continue to boil and stir the mixture.

  3. Remove the bay leaves before adding the flour.

Serve

  1. Pour the pudding into a dish and dot with pieces of butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and egg yolks thicken into a pudding.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the pudding as they heat.
Flour
Its starch swells in hot liquid and thickens the pudding.
Bay leaves
Infuse the hot milk with a subtle aroma before being removed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished pudding at serving.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually while stirring. Flour starch swells and thickens in hot liquid, but if it is added in one go it clumps. Adding it slowly while stirring spreads the granules so the pudding stays smooth and does not become too thick.

“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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