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Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A chocolate custard baked over soaked bread, finished with meringue and custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chocolate base

  1. Boil the milk, butter, sugar, and chocolate until thick.

  2. Pour the mixture over the bread slices that have been soaked in a little milk.

  3. When cool, stir in the unbeaten yolks of the eggs.

Bake and top

  1. Bake until done.

  2. Top with meringue.

  3. Brown the meringue.

Serve

  1. Serve with 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.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich the custard-like base, adding richness and helping it set when baked.
Bread
Soaked slices form the body of the pudding, absorbing the chocolate mixture to hold its structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that cooks with the sugar and chocolate to form a thick, smooth base.
Chocolate
Supplies the main flavor and, melted into hot milk, thickens the base.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and helps the mixture thicken as it boils.

The step that matters

Boiling the milk, butter, sugar, and chocolate until thick. Heating the mixture thickens it by starch and protein gelling and melting the chocolate evenly. Undercooking leaves it thin, so the bread will not hold together; overheating can scorch the sugar and milk solids.

“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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