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Dessert

Custard Pudding

A custard pudding made with thick cream, sugar, egg yolks, and cinnamon, baked in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the cream with a piece of cinnamon.

  2. Add the sugar to the boiled cream and let it cool.

  3. Beat the egg yolks.

  4. Stir the beaten yolks into the cooled mixture.

  5. Heat gently until thick, but do not let it boil.

Prepare the cloth

  1. Butter a cloth.

  2. Dust the cloth with flour.

  3. Tie the custard mixture tightly in the cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 45 minutes.

  2. Remove from the pot.

  3. Let it cool slightly.

  4. Untie the cloth.

  5. Invert onto a dish.

  6. Sprinkle with sugar.

  7. Serve with melted butter and a little wine.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set with gentle heat.
Thick cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the pudding a smooth, creamy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the set custard's texture.

The step that matters

Heat gently until thick, but do not let it boil. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the mixture boils, the proteins scramble and the custard turns grainy and loses its smooth texture.

“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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