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Dessert

Butter-Milk Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, buttermilk, grated roll, lemon peel, nutmeg, cream, clarified butter, eggs, and sweetened with brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Butter-Milk Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Turn the new milk with the buttermilk and drain off the whey.

Mix and bake

  1. Mix the curd with the grated roll, lemon peel, nutmeg, cream, clarified butter, and beaten egg yolks and whites.

  2. Sweeten well and bake for 45 minutes with or without puff pastry.

  3. Alternatively, it can be boiled.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the curd that makes up the body of the pudding.
Buttermilk
Its acidity helps the milk curdle and gives the pudding a tangy note.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender, creamy texture.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness as they set during baking.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and a smooth, moist texture.
Grated roll
Soaks up liquid and adds body to the pudding.

The step that matters

Turn the new milk with the buttermilk and drain off the whey. Curdling needs the acid of the buttermilk to coagulate the milk proteins; if the curd is under-formed or the whey is not fully drained, the pudding will be watery and fail to set firmly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, buttermilk, nutmeg, cream, butter, egg, 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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