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Dessert

Arrow-root Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with arrowroot, milk, eggs, sugar, and spices, baked and garnished with sweet-meats or citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Arrow-root 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.

Prepare the base

  1. Mix 4 cups of arrow-root with 2 cups of cold milk.

  2. Boil 2 cups of milk and flavor it with cinnamon, peach leaves, or lemon peel.

  3. Stir the arrow-root mixture into the boiling milk.

Finish the pudding

  1. Once cooled, add 6 beaten egg yolks mixed with 4 ounces of sugar.

  2. Fold in 6 stiffly beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

  2. Garnish the top with sweet-meats or chopped citron.

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. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrow-root
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding a smooth, tender body.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and moisture that the starch thickens and the eggs set into.
Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and help it set into a soft, custard-like texture.
Egg whites
Trap air when stiffly beaten, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the texture of the set pudding.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air in their foam, which gives the pudding lift. Folding gently keeps that air in, while stirring or overmixing deflates it and leaves a denser pudding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon, peach, egg, sugar, butter, meat):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, peach, egg, sugar, butter, meat. 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.

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