Skip to main content
Dessert

Dandy Pudding

A custard pudding made with milk, egg yolks, corn starch, sugar, and flavored with lemon or vanilla, topped with frosted egg whites.

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

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 ↓

Dandy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk until very hot.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold milk.

  3. Stir the dissolved corn starch into the hot milk.

  4. Add the egg yolks.

  5. Stir until the mixture thickens.

  6. Boil in a pail set in a kettle of boiling water.

  7. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  8. Flavor the pudding with lemon or vanilla extract.

  9. Let the pudding cool.

Make the meringue and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff.

  2. Flavor the frosting with lemon or vanilla extract.

  3. Set the pudding in the oven.

  4. Brown the frosting until lightly colored.

  5. Serve cold for the best taste.

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. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 starch and yolks thicken into a custard.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the custard as it heats.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, set custard.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Stir the dissolved corn starch into the hot milk and keep stirring until it thickens. Cornstarch must be dispersed in cold liquid first, then heated with constant stirring so the starch granules swell and gelatinize evenly. Stopping early leaves a thin pudding; stirring poorly causes lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes