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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A quick milk pudding flavored with cinnamon, thickened with flour and egg yolks.

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 ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the stick of cinnamon in the milk.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with some of the milk.

  3. Mix the egg yolk mixture back into the remaining milk.

  4. Sift the flour gently into the milk while stirring with a wooden spoon until it thickens.

  5. Continue stirring and bring it to a boil.

  6. Remove the cinnamon stick and pour the pudding into a dish.

Serve

  1. Dot with pieces of butter and serve.

  2. For a richer pudding, stir in the heavy cream before serving.

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and egg yolks thicken and set into pudding.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the pudding as it heats.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a pudding as it is stirred and brought to a boil.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a smoother, fuller mouthfeel when stirred in.

The step that matters

Bring it to a boil while stirring the flour mixture. Flour starch thickens the milk only as it heats; stirring continuously prevents lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would leave the pudding grainy or burnt-tasting.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, cream, 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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