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Dessert

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

A quick pudding made by beating egg, flour, and milk, served with butter, sugar, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour mixture

  1. Beat the egg until very light.

  2. Gradually add flour until it is moistened.

  3. Rub the mixture through your hands until it resembles fine dry lumps like bread crumbs.

Make the pudding

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a pot.

  2. Stir in enough of the flour mixture to thicken the milk.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter, sugar, and rich cream if available.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg
Beaten egg adds richness and helps bind the flour into small lumps.
All-purpose flour
Flour thickens the hot milk, giving the pudding its body.
Milk
Milk forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a pudding.

The step that matters

Stir in enough of the flour mixture to thicken the milk. Starch in flour thickens liquid when heated. Adding too little leaves the pudding thin, while adding it all at once can form lumps, so add it gradually while stirring.

“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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