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Dessert

To Boil a Custard Pudding

A boiled custard pudding made with cream, flour, eggs, nutmeg, and sweet wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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To Boil a Custard Pudding

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Boil a Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Take 1 pint of cream and reserve 2-3 tablespoons.

  2. Mix the reserved cream with the flour.

  3. Butter a wooden bowl.

Make the custard

  1. Bring the remaining cream to a boil.

  2. Remove the cream from heat.

  3. Stir in the cream-flour mixture.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

  5. Beat in the egg yolks.

  6. Beat in the egg whites.

  7. Add salt, nutmeg, and sack.

  8. Sweeten to taste.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the bowl.

  2. Cover the bowl with a cloth.

  3. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

  4. Untie the cloth.

  5. Turn the pudding onto a dish.

  6. Pour melted butter over the pudding.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the pudding a smooth, tender body.
Flour
Thickens the cream so the pudding holds together when it sets.
Egg yolks
Set the custard as they cook and add richness and colour.
Egg whites
Add a lighter, airier texture to the set pudding.
Sack
Adds sweetness and a warm wine aroma.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream-flour mixture. Flour mixed into cold cream and then stirred into hot cream thickens evenly. Starch swells as it heats, so adding it smoothly off the heat helps prevent lumps.

“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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