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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet bread made with sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and salt, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the sugar and butter together.

  2. Beat in the whipped egg yolks and milk.

  3. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt alternately with the stiffened egg whites.

  4. Beat the mixture for one minute.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered mold and bake until a straw comes out clean from the center.

  2. Turn out and slice while hot.

  3. Serve with liquid 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. Egg + flourtop 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

Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give it a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and moisture and help bind the batter.
Milk
Provides liquid that hydrates the flour and makes the batter pourable.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cake as the batter sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiffness, they trap air that lightens the batter and helps it rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, causing the cake to rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiffened egg whites. Stirring too hard or too long deflates the air trapped in the whipped whites, leaving a dense cake. Fold gently, alternating with the flour, so the batter stays light and rises well.

“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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