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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A baked chocolate pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, eggs, and sugar, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add the bread crumbs and grated chocolate to the milk.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the sugar and beaten egg yolks.

  4. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 15 minutes.

Top and serve

  1. Make a meringue by beating the egg whites with the sugar until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pudding and brown it in the oven.

  3. Serve cold with cream.

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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and give the pudding its body and soft texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard base and add richness as they set during baking.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping and sets lightly when browned.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the bread crumbs and forms the custard base.
Grated chocolate
Adds chocolate flavor and color to the pudding base.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilize the beaten egg whites in the meringue.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Egg whites need to be beaten until they hold stiff peaks so the meringue stays airy. Underbeaten whites collapse, and overbeaten whites turn grainy and weep, so the topping loses its volume.

“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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