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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A sweet, custard-like dessert made with sugar, flour, butter, egg yolks, egg whites, and boiled milk, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Sponge 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 custard

  1. Mix sugar and flour with a little cold milk.

  2. Stir in boiling milk and cook until thick and smooth.

  3. Add butter and mix well.

  4. Stir in the well-beaten egg yolks.

Fold and bake

  1. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Bake in a shallow dish placed in a pan of hot water at 350°F (175°C) for about 25 minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the texture of the custard.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the custard holds its body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender crumb.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set as the pudding bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens and bakes into the pudding.
Egg whites
Whipped air lightens the batter and helps the pudding rise.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whipped whites. Stirring or deflating them makes the pudding dense rather than light and spongy.

“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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