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Dessert

Cream Pudding

A baked custard made with eggs, flour, milk, sugar, lemon rind, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Cream Pudding

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Stir in the flour, milk, salt, lemon rind, and sugar.

  3. Just before baking, stir in the cream.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set into a firm custard when baked.
Flour
Provides structure and thickens the batter as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that cooks into a tender texture.
Cream
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Just before baking, stir in the cream.. Flour-based batters toughen when overmixed because gluten develops with stirring. Adding the cream last and stirring only until combined keeps the batter tender and the cream's richness intact.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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