Skip to main content
Dessert

Hasty, Pudding

A milk pudding flavored with cinnamon, thickened with flour and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hasty, Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the stick of cinnamon in the milk.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with some of the milk.

  3. Mix the egg yolk mixture with the remaining milk.

  4. Sift the flour gently into the milk while stirring with a wooden spoon until it thickens.

  5. Continue stirring and bring it to a boil.

  6. Remove the cinnamon stick and pour the pudding into a dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Dot with pieces of butter and serve.

  2. For a richer pudding, add the 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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and egg yolks thicken into a pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they heat and add richness to the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding body.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour when dotted over the finished pudding.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, fuller texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Sifting the flour into the hot milk while stirring. Flour dropped in without constant stirring clumps into lumps that do not dissolve. Sifting gently and stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the pudding thickens smoothly.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

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

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes