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Dessert

Boiled Arrow-root Pudding

A sweet pudding made from arrow-root, milk, eggs, and salt, boiled and served with butter and currant jelly.

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 ↓

Boiled Arrow-root Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the arrow-root with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. When the milk is near boiling, pour it over the arrow-root while stirring.

  4. Return the mixture to the pan.

  5. Heat for a few minutes to thicken without boiling, stirring briskly.

Finish and cook

  1. Once cooled, add the beaten eggs and salt.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered basin.

  3. Boil for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter and currant jelly.

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. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Arrow-root
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding texture when heated.
Eggs
Add richness and help the pudding set firm once cooked.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrow-root thickens and the eggs enrich.

The step that matters

Heat without boiling after adding the arrow-root. Arrow-root thickens as it heats, but it can lose its thickening power and turn thin or gluey if it boils hard. Stirring briskly keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter. 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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