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Dessert

Plain Sago Pudding

A sweet pudding made with sago, milk, corn starch, sugar, egg, vanilla chocolate, served with whipped cream or boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Plain Sago Pudding

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Plain Sago Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Substitute sago for tapioca in the tapioca pudding recipe.

  2. Make a corn-starch pudding using 1 quart of milk, 3 tablespoons of corn-starch, and 3 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Remove half of the pudding and flavor it to taste.

  4. To the remaining pudding, add 1 beaten egg and 4 tablespoons of grated vanilla chocolate dissolved in a little milk.

Mold and serve

  1. Pour into a mold, alternating the dark and light mixtures.

  2. Serve with whipped cream or boiled custard.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Vanilla + chocolatetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Sago
Starch that swells in hot milk and thickens the pudding into a soft, sliceable body.
Milk
Liquid base that hydrates the starch and forms the creamy body of the pudding.
Corn-starch
Thickens the pudding as its starch granules swell and gelatinize when heated in milk.
Egg
Adds richness and helps set the pudding as its proteins thicken with heat.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and softens the flavor of the starch-thickened milk.
Vanilla chocolate
Adds flavor and a darker color to one half of the pudding for the layered look.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg. Egg proteins can curdle or turn grainy if they meet a very hot mixture too quickly. Stir the egg in gently and keep the pudding from boiling hard so it thickens smoothly.

“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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