Skip to main content
Dessert

Chocolate Pudding

A baked chocolate pudding made with milk, flour, butter, chocolate, sugar, almonds, eggs, and topped with grated zwieback.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chocolate 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 batter

  1. Boil the chocolate with the butter and flour.

  2. Remove from heat and add the almonds, sugar, and egg yolks.

  3. Fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a baking dish with butter and pour in the mixture.

  2. Sprinkle with grated zwieback and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with vanilla sauce.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Chocolate + almondtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,733 recipes

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

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Egg whites, whipped stiff and folded in, lighten the pudding and help it set with structure.
Flour
Starch thickens the chocolate mixture so it holds its body while baking.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the pudding.
Unsweetened chocolate
Provides the main chocolate flavor and deep color.
Almonds
Add nutty flavor and a slightly firm, tender texture.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiff-beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only when whipped stiff, and overmixing or deflating them while folding makes the pudding dense instead of light.

“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.

More chocolate pudding recipes

You might also like