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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A sweet custard-like dessert made with milk, butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Dissolve the flour in part of the milk.

  3. Add the dissolved flour to the boiling milk.

  4. Boil for ten minutes.

  5. Add the butter and sugar while hot.

  6. When cool, add the yolks of the eggs.

Bake

  1. Beat the egg whites separately.

  2. Fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.

  3. Bake in a quart dish set in a pan of hot water for half an hour.

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. Milk + buttertop 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. Flour + eggtop 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich and thicken the custard, while beaten whites lighten the pudding and help it rise.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a base that gives the pudding body and structure.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth texture to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and softens its texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set into.

The step that matters

Fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites, which is what makes the sponge light. Stirring vigorously deflates the foam and leaves the pudding dense.

“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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