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Dessert

Sponge-cake Pudding

A custard pudding made by layering sponge cake with a milk, egg, and sugar custard, baked or steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Sponge-cake Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a mold with butter and decorate it with dried cherries or raisins.

  2. Fill the mold three-quarters full with sponge cake.

Make and pour the custard

  1. In a bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, and sugar.

  2. Pour the custard mixture over the sponge cake.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil or steam for 30 minutes.

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

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

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard so it binds the sponge cake into a tender, sliceable pudding.
Sponge cake
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard as it cooks.
Milk
Makes up the liquid base of the custard, keeping the pudding moist.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds softness to the finished pudding.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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