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Delhi Pudding

A milk pudding made with almonds, sugar, arrowroot, boiled and set in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Delhi Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch and chop the almonds very small.

  2. Mix the chopped almonds with the sugar and arrowroot.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk, then pour it over the arrowroot mixture and stir.

  2. If the mixture does not thicken enough, return it to the saucepan and boil for 1 minute.

  3. Pour into a wet mold and let it stand until firm.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with jam or custard sauce, or serve plain.

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. Almond + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a set, smooth pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens into a pudding.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and body to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding.

The step that matters

Thickening the mixture. Arrowroot thickens when hot liquid is added and then set as it cools. If the mixture is too thin after pouring, reboiling it briefly helps the starch thicken fully before it is moulded.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Beetrootfits less well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, almond, 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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