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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

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

Cottage 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Rub the butter and 1 cup of sugar together until creamy.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the 3 eggs and the white of 1 egg until very light, then add to the mixture.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and add it to the mixture.

  3. Mix the cream of tartar into the flour, then add to the batter and combine well.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake until golden.

  2. Once removed from the oven, quickly spread the top with frosting made from the beaten whites of the 2 remaining eggs and ½ cup of sugar.

  3. Chill in the refrigerator and serve with hot wine 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Eggs
Add structure and lift, and the beaten whites trap air for a lighter texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas that makes it rise.
Cream of tartar
An acid that reacts with baking soda to release gas for rising.

The step that matters

Spread the frosting right after the pudding leaves the oven. Beaten egg whites are a foam that deflates and loses its airy texture if left to stand. Spreading it quickly while the pudding is hot helps the topping stay light and lets it set and brown in the heat.

“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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