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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A steamed sponge pudding served with a sweet sauce made from sugar, butter, eggs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Sponge Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, eggs, flour, soda, and cream of tartar until smooth.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  3. Steam steadily for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat together sugar and butter for the sauce.

  2. Add the yolks of 2 eggs and mix well.

  3. Pour in boiling water and lemon or orange juice.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

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. Sugar + creamtop 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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and, creamed with butter, helps give the sauce its body.
Eggs
Provide structure and moisture, and their whipped whites add lightness to the sauce.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as the batter sets.
Soda
Reacts with the acid to release carbon dioxide, which makes the pudding rise.
Cream of tartar
Supplies acid that reacts with the soda to produce gas for a lighter crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the sauce.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.. Beaten egg whites hold air in a foam. Stirring vigorously or overmixing breaks that foam, so the sauce turns dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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