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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread crumbs, sour milk, sugar, currants, suet, baking soda, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. 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 the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, sour milk, sugar, currants, suet, baking soda, and salt.

  3. Add flour gradually until a batter forms.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake for 1 hour.

  2. For the sauce, boil together 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water.

  3. Thicken the sauce with a little flour or cornstarch dissolved in water.

  4. Flavor the sauce with vanilla before serving.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Milk and flour 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

Bread crumbs
Give the pudding body and a soft, tender crumb structure.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the batter.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the crumb and keeps the pudding moist.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps make the sauce syrupy.
Flour
Gives the batter enough structure to hold together when baked.

The step that matters

Adding flour gradually. Too much flour at once makes the batter stiff and dense, so the pudding bakes heavy. Adding it slowly lets you stop once the batter is just workable.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, flour. 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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