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Semolina Pudding

Semolina pudding made with milk, sugar, eggs, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Semolina and sugar work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 351 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Semolina 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 base

  1. Combine semolina, ½ cup cold milk, and sugar in a saucepan and boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Whisk eggs and the remaining milk together in a separate bowl to make a custard.

  3. Mix the custard with the semolina mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pie dish and bake at 350 °F (175 °C) for 30 minutes.

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. Semolina + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together351 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  3. Semolina + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together316 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Semolina
Thickens the milk into a soft, starchy base that gives the pudding its body.
Eggs
Add protein that sets the custard as it bakes, giving a firm but tender texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that gives the pudding a soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and eggs.

The step that matters

Boiling the semolina for the full 15 minutes. Boiling cooks the semolina grains and swells their starch so the base thickens. If the mixture is cut short, the grains stay raw and gritty, and the pudding may not set properly once the custard is added and baked.

“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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