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Dessert

Favorite Peach Pudding

A baked peach dessert with a drop batter of sugar, milk, egg, baking powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Peach and milk work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 781 recipes. Both carry phellandrene, which smells minty. The science ↓

Favorite Peach 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).

  2. Place the whole peeled peaches in a buttered dish.

Make and bake the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, milk, egg, baking powder, and enough flour to create a drop batter.

  2. Pour the batter over the peaches.

  3. Bake until dark, rich brown.

Serve

  1. Invert the dish to serve with peaches on top, and accompany with cream or sweet 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. Peach + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Peaches
Provide the fruit base and moisture that cooks down beneath the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown deeply in the oven.
Milk
Moistens the batter so it bakes into a tender, soft crumb.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the batter rises and lightens.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets the batter into a cakey body.

The step that matters

Bake until dark, rich brown. Browning comes from sugars and proteins reacting in the oven's heat. Pulling the pudding too early leaves a pale, gummy batter, while the record gives no specific time, so check the colour and the centre rather than the clock.

Swap the peach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, egg, 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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