Skip to main content
Dessert

Common Batter Pudding

A simple pudding made by mixing eggs, flour, salt, and milk, then cooking in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Common Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly and mix with half a pint of milk.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Gradually add the mixture to the flour, stirring until the batter is smooth.

  4. Thin the batter with another half pint of milk.

Cook and serve

  1. Flour a wet pudding cloth, pour in the batter, and tie it securely.

  2. Place the cloth in boiling water and cook for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately with wine sauce, hot fruit compote, or raspberry vinegar.

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
Provide structure as they set, binding the batter into a firm, sliceable pudding.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network and body that give the pudding its substance.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Passing the egg and milk mixture through a sieve. Sieving removes strands of egg white and small lumps, so the batter cooks smooth. Adding flour gradually while stirring prevents lumps that would stay in the finished pudding.

“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 batter pudding recipes

Boiled 71Baked 53Apple 30Steamed 30Fruit 19Meat 9 See all 241 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes