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Dessert

Batter Fruit Pudding

A pudding made with apples, batter, and boiled, served with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Batter Fruit Pudding

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 ↓

Batter Fruit Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a pudding dish that holds 1½ pints.

  2. Fill it nearly full with the cut‑up apples.

  3. In a bowl, mix the flour, eggs, and milk to make a batter.

Assemble

  1. Pour the batter over the apples.

  2. Tie a buttered and floured cloth over the dish.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 1¼ hours.

  2. Turn it out onto a hot dish and sprinkle sugar over it.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Eggs
Set the batter and bind it into a firm, sliceable pudding as they cook.
Flour
Gives the batter body and structure so it holds together once cooked.
Milk
Loosens the batter and adds moisture so it cooks into a tender crumb.
Baking apples
Supply the fruit base, with moisture and tart-sweet flavour that cooks down through the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and greasing the dish helps the pudding release cleanly.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 1¼ hours. A long, steady boil cooks the eggs and flour all the way through, so the batter sets into a firm pudding rather than staying wet in the centre.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

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