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Dessert

Boiled Cake-pudding

A boiled cake pudding made with sugar, flour, butter, eggs, milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, and optional fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Cake-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift the cream of tartar with the flour.

  2. Mix the baking soda into the milk.

  3. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix well.

  4. If using fruit, add it to the mixture.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

  2. Boil for 2 hours if plain, or 3 hours if with fruit.

  3. Serve with wine 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 main structure that sets as the pudding cooks.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as they set.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the crumb moist.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lightens it.
Cream of tartar
Supplies acidity that reacts with baking soda to help the pudding rise.

The step that matters

Boil for the full time. Long, steady steaming gently sets the batter through to the centre. Cutting the time short can leave the pudding dense, wet, or underdone.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter, egg, milk, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, egg, milk, cream. 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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