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Dessert

Mountain Pudding

A baked dessert made with flour, milk, lemon rind, sugar, egg whites, and a topping of stiff icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Mountain Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Butter a pie dish and line it with ratafias.

  2. Grate the lemon rind over the ratafias.

  3. Mix flour with a little cold milk to a smooth paste.

  4. Gradually add cold milk to make a pint and boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  5. Pour the mixture over the ratafias and soak for 10 minutes.

Make the icing and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth and stir in the sugar.

  2. Add a little corn-flour or arrowroot to make the icing stiff.

  3. Arrange the icing on the pudding in little mounds to imitate mountains.

  4. Bake in the oven until lightly browned and serve cold.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard base.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff froth that forms the airy mountain topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps it hold its shape.
Corn-flour or arrowroot
Stiffens the icing so the mounds keep their shape.
Ratafias
Soak up the custard, giving a moist, flavourful base layer.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a stiff froth. Whites must be whipped until they hold stiff peaks, since the air trapped in the foam gives the topping its lightness. Under-beaten or greasy whites will not hold the mounds, and sugar should be stirred in gently to keep the foam from collapsing.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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