Skip to main content
Dessert

Delicate Pudding

A light pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, milk, custard, whipped egg whites, currant jelly, and blanched almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Delicate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the flour, milk, baking powder, and well-beaten eggs until combined.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  4. Boil for 30 minutes.

Make the custard

  1. Whisk together the yolks of 2 eggs, 1 pint of milk, and sugar to taste to make the custard.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the cooked pudding in a dish.

  2. Pour the custard around the pudding.

  3. Whip the egg whites with 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar until stiff.

  4. Drop the whipped egg whites onto the custard to form nests.

  5. Place a bit of currant jelly in each nest.

  6. Blanch the almonds.

  7. Stick the blanched almonds on top of the pudding.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and enrich the custard, giving the pudding structure and a rich texture.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to add fat and tenderness to the pudding crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding once it sets with heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the creamed butter become light and aerated.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten until they hold firm peaks; underbeaten whites stay runny and will not form nests that hold their shape when set on the custard.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesAlmond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipes