Skip to main content
Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sugar, milk, egg, butter, baking powder, flour, and water, served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cottage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix sugar, sweet milk, egg, butter, baking powder, and flour in a bowl until smooth.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased mold and steam for 2.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil water, 3 tablespoons sugar, a little salt, and 1 tablespoon butter for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix flour and water until smooth.

  3. Add the flour and water mixture to the boiling sauce to thicken.

  4. Strain the sauce to remove lumps.

  5. Flavor the sauce with lemon or vanilla.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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 so the pudding holds its shape after steaming.
Egg
Adds structure and richness to the batter as it sets during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in both the pudding and the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and the sauce.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and liquid so the batter mixes smooth.

The step that matters

Add the flour and water mixture to the boiling sauce. Flour thickens only when it is stirred into hot liquid and given time to cook; adding it to cool liquid or not stirring leaves lumps, which is why the sauce is strained afterward.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More cottage pudding recipes

Sauce 10Steamed 6Apple 5Strawberry 3 See all 326 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes