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Dessert

Thatched Pudding

A baked pudding made with flour, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, lemon peel, 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 ↓

Thatched Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter.

  2. Mix the flour smoothly with a little cold milk.

  3. Pour the remaining boiling hot milk over the flour mixture.

  4. Add the sugar, melted butter, and grated lemon peel, and mix well.

  5. When cool, stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  6. Add the whipped egg whites last and gently fold into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a baking dish and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes or until done.

  2. Turn out of the dish and spread some preserves on top.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Yolks enrich and set the custard while whipped whites lighten the batter and add rise.
Flour
Starch thickens the hot milk into a smooth base that holds the pudding's structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the flour thickens and the eggs set, giving the pudding its body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the finished pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Whites hold air only when whipped stiff, and overmixing or stirring them hard knocks that air out. Folding gently keeps the batter light so the pudding rises rather than turning dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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