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Dessert

Souffle Pudding

A sweet pudding made with corn starch, sugar, butter, vanilla, egg yolks, and egg whites, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Souffle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a saucepan, mix corn-starch and pounded sugar smoothly.

  2. Add butter and vanilla, stirring briskly over heat until it boils.

  3. Vigorously work in the egg yolks.

Bake

  1. Gently fold in the whisked egg whites until slightly incorporated.

  2. 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.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

  4. Butter + vanillatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Corn-starch
Thickens the batter as it heats, giving the pudding body and structure.
Egg whites
Whipped air lifts the mixture, giving the pudding its soufflé-like rise.
Egg yolks
Enrich the batter and help set it, adding richness and a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a soft, tender crumb.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the batter's texture.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the whisked egg whites. Folding rather than stirring keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Those bubbles expand in the oven and create the rise, so overmixing deflates the batter and yields a dense pudding.

“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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