Skip to main content
Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, eggs, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the sugar, melted butter, sweet milk, flour, egg yolk, and baking powder until smooth.

  2. Gently fold in the beaten egg white.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Serve warm with your choice of 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 + flourtop 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 holds the pudding's crumb together as it bakes.
Egg white
Beaten egg white folded in adds air and lightness to the batter.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, making the pudding rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the crumb.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg white. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the egg white. Stirring hard would deflate the batter, leaving a denser pudding with less lift.

“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.

More cottage pudding recipes

You might also like