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Dessert

Fruit Puff Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a batter of flour, baking powder, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Fruit Puff Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Sift the mixture into milk until very soft.

Steam the puddings

  1. Grease cups and place them in a steamer.

  2. Add a spoonful of batter to each cup, then add berries or steamed apples.

  3. Cover with another spoonful of batter and steam for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, beat together the eggs, butter, sugar, boiling milk, and strawberries.

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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure as the puddings set during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the puddings rise and become light.
Eggs
Bind the sauce and help give it a smooth, thickened body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the strawberries.

The step that matters

Sift the mixture into milk until very soft. The batter must be loose enough to stay tender when steamed. Too little liquid makes dense, heavy puddings, while the baking powder needs a moist batter to produce gas and lift the pudding.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, butter, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, butter, sugar. 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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