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Steamed Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made from a stiff batter of flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, sweet milk, and topped with cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Steamed Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.

  2. Add enough sweet milk to make a stiff batter, similar to cake batter.

  3. Beat the mixture well.

Steam and serve

  1. Drop the batter into buttered pudding cups, placing 1 tablespoon of cherries on top of each.

  2. Steam for 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with hot 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 structure of the pudding as the batter sets during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its moisture and stiff, cake-like consistency.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly and taste rounded.
Cherries
Add fruit flavour and moisture to the top of each pudding.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well. Thorough beating mixes the baking powder evenly through the stiff batter, so each pudding rises uniformly instead of unevenly or heavily.

“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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