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Arrowroot Pudding

A sweet custard made from milk, arrowroot, eggs, and sugar, served with cream and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Arrowroot Pudding

Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Dissolve the arrowroot in a little milk and mix it with the beaten eggs and sugar.

  3. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Boil for three minutes, stirring constantly.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream and sugar, and add lemon for flavor if desired.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  5. Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, set custard-like pudding.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the pudding as they combine with the hot milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens and the eggs enrich.

The step that matters

Stirring the mixture into the boiling milk. Arrowroot thickens when heated and can clump if added unevenly. Stirring constantly while boiling keeps the starch dispersed so the pudding turns smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, arrowroot, egg, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Strawberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, arrowroot, egg, 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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