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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A simple milk pudding made with milk, egg yolk, flour, and salt, cooked until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the yolk of an egg into ½ pint of new milk with ¼ teaspoon salt.

  2. Gradually stir this mixture into 3 tablespoons of flour to create a smooth batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat 4 pints of milk until scalding hot.

  2. Pour in the batter while stirring continuously to keep it smooth and prevent burning.

  3. Allow it to thicken without boiling, then serve immediately.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Flour
Starch that swells in the hot milk and thickens the pudding.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps the pudding set smooth and creamy.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a pudding.

The step that matters

Pouring the batter into the hot milk while stirring. Flour lumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly, and continuous stirring disperses the starch so it thickens smoothly. Keeping the mixture below a boil prevents scorching on the base and stops the thickened starch from breaking down.

“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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