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Dessert

Hasty Pudding

A simple milk, butter, flour, and sugar pudding, optionally flavored with lemon peel or jam.

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 the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Quickly stir in the flour until it becomes lumpy.

  3. Pour the mixture into a dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Melt the butter and sugar together, then pour it into the center of the pudding.

  2. Optionally, add grated lemon peel to the milk or serve with jam.

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 + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Milk
Liquid that hydrates the flour so its starch can thicken into a pudding.
Flour
Its starch thickens the hot milk into a soft, set pudding structure.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour quickly. Flour added to hot liquid clumps on contact, and its starch only thickens the milk evenly when it is dispersed. Stirring fast spreads the flour through the milk before the outer layers set.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, sugar. 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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