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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A quick milk pudding thickened with flour, sweetened with butter and sugar, cooked until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk in a crock on the stove until it boils.

  2. Sift in flour gradually, stirring until thick and stiff.

Finish

  1. Cream together 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of flour for the cream.

  2. Pour in 1 pint of milk and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Flavor to taste.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the boiling milk into a stiff, set mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the creamed mixture.

The step that matters

Sifting in the flour gradually. Adding flour slowly while stirring keeps it dispersed in the hot milk, preventing lumps and an uneven, grainy texture as the starch thickens.

“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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