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Dessert

Delmonico Pudding

A custard pudding made with eggs, sugar, corn starch, sweet milk, baked and topped with sugar and whipped cream.

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 ↓

Delmonico Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Separate the eggs.

  2. Beat the yolks well.

  3. Add sugar and corn starch to the yolks.

  4. Heat the sweet milk in a double boiler.

  5. Stir the yolk mixture into the hot milk and cook until thickened.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan.

  2. Beat the egg whites.

  3. Spread the beaten egg whites with sugar on top.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until light brown.

  5. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the milk into a custard, and whites form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, spread over the beaten whites, helps them brown.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk and yolk mixture as it cooks, giving the custard body.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which thickens when heated with the yolks and starch.

The step that matters

Cook the yolk mixture until thickened. Stirring the yolks into hot milk and cooking gently lets the cornstarch swell and set the custard. Undercooking leaves it thin, while overheating can curdle the eggs.

“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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