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Dessert

Delmonico Pudding

A custard pudding made with milk, cornstarch, egg yolks, sugar, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Delmonico 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 custard

  1. Dissolve cornstarch in cold water.

  2. In a saucepan, combine milk and dissolved cornstarch.

  3. Beat egg yolks with sugar until light.

  4. Add the egg yolk mixture to the saucepan and boil for 3-4 minutes until thick.

Bake and brown

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

  2. Beat egg whites until stiff and gradually add 6 tablespoons sugar.

  3. Spread the beaten egg whites on top of the pudding and brown under the broiler.

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

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

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 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

Milk
Provides the liquid that the starch and egg yolks thicken into a custard.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the custard body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard when heated and add richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the beaten egg whites hold their stiff structure.
Egg whites
Whip into a light meringue that forms the browned topping.

The step that matters

Boiling the custard until thick. Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil to thicken completely, but egg yolks can scramble if the heat is too high. Stir constantly and watch the texture closely so the custard becomes smooth and thick without curdling.

“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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