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Dessert

Cup Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, sugar, milk, flour, butter, baking soda, and preserves.

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

Cup Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cups

  1. Butter the cups.

  2. Pour a little preserves into each cup.

  3. Half fill the cups with batter made from the eggs, sugar, milk, flour, butter, and baking soda.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve with hot 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. Milk + buttertop 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. Milk + flourtop 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. 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the pudding its set structure.
Flour
Forms the starch and gluten network that gives the pudding its body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Milk
Supplies liquid that hydrates the flour and keeps the batter moist.

The step that matters

Half fill the cups. The batter expands as it heats and steams. Filling only halfway leaves room to rise, so the pudding doesn't overflow or turn dense and compacted.

“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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