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Custard Pudding

Custard pudding made with flour, milk, egg yolks, sugar, nutmeg, lemon peel, and egg whites, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 ↓

Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and milk.

  2. Add the egg yolks and flavor with sugar, nutmeg, or lemon peel as desired.

  3. Beat the egg whites until frothy and fold them into the mixture.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture into a pot and boil for a little over 30 minutes.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and thicken the custard as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Beaten to a froth, they add lightness and airiness to the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the custard holds its body while cooking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs and flour set into a custard.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into a pot and boil for a little over 30 minutes. Egg proteins set gradually as they heat, and boiling too hard or too long can curdle the custard and make it grainy. Keep the heat controlled and watch the texture as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, sugar, nutmeg. 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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