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Dessert

Sour Cream Pudding

A baked pudding made with sour cream, eggs, flour, and a sweet cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sour Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sour cream with beaten egg yolks, flour, salt, and baking soda.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and gently fold them into the mixture.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake for a few minutes until set.

  2. For the sauce, cream together sugar and butter, then add sweet cream and mix well.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter into a set custard-like structure.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and give it rise and a airy texture.
Flour
Provides structure so the batter sets firm rather than staying loose.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity of the sour cream to produce gas, helping the pudding rise.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tang, and its acidity activates the baking soda.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it a smooth, creamed texture with the butter.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiff egg whites trap air that makes the batter rise. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the foam and leaves 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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