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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, sugar, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Cottage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs and sugar together until well combined.

  2. Add the milk and mix thoroughly.

  3. Combine the flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar in another bowl.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

  5. Fold in the melted butter.

Steam

  1. Pour the batter into a greased steaming dish.

  2. Steam for 1 ½ to 2 hours until cooked through.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as its starch sets.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the pudding.
Cream of tartar
Supplies acid that reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise.
Melted butter
Adds fat for a tender, moist crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the crumb tender.

The step that matters

Stirring the dry ingredients into the wet mixture. Adding flour gradually and stirring just until smooth keeps lumps out and limits gluten development, so the pudding stays tender rather than tough. The leavening reaction starts once the batter is mixed, so the batter should go into the steamer promptly.

“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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