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White Pudding

A milk-based pudding thickened with flour and eggs, flavored with orange‑flower or rose water, finished with butter and served with red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

White Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk with the orange-flower or rose water.

  2. Beat the eggs in a bowl, then mix in the flour and salt.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. If the mixture is not thick, add a little more flour.

  5. Just before removing from heat, stir in the walnut-sized piece of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve topped with red currant jelly.

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. Orange + red curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Orange + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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

Eggs
Set and thicken the custard as they cook in the hot milk.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds together rather than staying runny.
Milk
Forms the body of the pudding and carries the flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Eggs can scramble if they meet very hot liquid too abruptly. Mixing them in steadily while stirring helps them blend evenly and thicken the pudding smoothly.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, orange, egg, flour, walnut, 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.

More white pudding recipes

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