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Dessert

Batter Pudding

A boiled pudding made from eggs, flour, milk, and salt, cooked in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Gradually stir the flour into the milk, dissolving all lumps.

  2. Beat the eggs until light and add them to the milk and flour mixture gradually.

  3. Add the salt and stir everything together well.

Prepare the cloth

  1. Dip a thick pudding cloth in boiling water and flour it.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the cloth and tie it up, leaving room for it to swell.

  2. Boil the pudding hard for 1 hour, then keep it in the pot until ready to serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 set the pudding into a firm, sliceable texture as they cook.
Flour
Provides starch that thickens the batter and gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Supplies liquid that hydrates the flour and adds moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth with room to swell. Flour and egg batter expand as they heat and steam, so leaving space in the cloth prevents the pudding from bursting or becoming compressed and dense.

“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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