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Dessert

Caramel Pudding

A sweet pudding made with milk, cornstarch, brown sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Caramel Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a small bowl, moisten the cornstarch with a little milk.

  3. Add the moistened cornstarch to the boiling milk, stirring quickly.

  4. In a separate pan, boil and scorch the brown sugar until it caramelizes.

  5. Pour the caramelized sugar into the cornstarch mixture and stir well.

Set

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it set.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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
Forms the liquid base that the cornstarch thickens into a pudding.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the pudding its set body.
Brown sugar
Caramelizes to give the pudding its characteristic toasty, sweet flavor and color.

The step that matters

Adding the moistened cornstarch to the boiling milk. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold liquid first, then stirred quickly into boiling milk; otherwise it clumps and does not thicken evenly. Starch granules swell and gelatinize once heated, so constant stirring keeps the thickening smooth.

“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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