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Dessert

Boiled Custard or Egg Pudding

A boiled custard made with eggs, milk, sugar, mace, cloves, and almond oil, served with butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Custard or Egg Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the arrowroot or flour with cold milk and the beaten egg whites and yolks.

  2. Gradually add hot milk flavored with mace and cloves, then stir in the sugar and essential oil of almonds.

  3. Stir well with a wooden spoon.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered basin or mold, tied in a floured cloth.

  2. Boil gently for 45 minutes.

  3. Serve with plain butter sauce.

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. Arrowroot + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Clove + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,605 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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, giving it body and structure.
Arrowroot or flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds its shape rather than running loose.
Hot milk
Provides the liquid base and carries the mace and clove flavour through the custard.
Powdered white sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the set custard's flavour.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 45 minutes. Egg proteins set at steady, moderate heat. A hard, rolling boil can curdle the eggs and leave the custard rough and grainy, so keep the water at a gentle simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (arrowroot, milk, egg, clove, sugar, almond, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, milk, egg, clove, sugar, almond, 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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