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Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A boiled pudding made from flour, salt, eggs, milk, and butter.

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 ↓

Boiled Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Boil a saucepan of water.

  2. In a basin, mix the flour with the salt. Break the eggs into the flour and beat well.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring until smooth.

  4. Let the batter stand for 1 hour.

  5. Grease a pudding basin with butter. Stir the batter and pour it into the basin.

Boil and serve

  1. Dip a pudding cloth in boiling water. Wring the cloth out. Flour the cloth.

  2. Cover the batter with the cloth and tie it securely with string. Place the pudding in the boiling water.

  3. Boil for 1 hour.

  4. Remove the basin from the saucepan. Take off the cloth.

  5. Turn the pudding out onto a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Forms the main structure of the batter as it sets during boiling.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm when cooked.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its liquid, pourable body.

The step that matters

Gradually add the milk, stirring until smooth. Adding the milk slowly while stirring lets the flour hydrate evenly, preventing lumps that would leave floury pockets in the cooked pudding.

“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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