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Dessert

Apricot Pudding

A steamed batter pudding with apricots, served with a sweet lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Apricot Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine flour, salt, sugar, melted butter, beaten eggs, and sweet milk in a bowl.

  2. Beat the batter for several minutes until aerated.

Steam the pudding

  1. In well-oiled cups, layer batter, sliced apricots, and more batter.

  2. Steam for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Boil sugar and water for 5 minutes for the sauce.

  2. Add juice from cooked or canned preserves and butter.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Dissolve cornstarch in cold water.

  5. Add the dissolved cornstarch to the sauce.

  6. Boil again.

  7. Stir in lemon juice to taste.

  8. Serve with the pudding.

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. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Apricot + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 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 the pudding steams.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter that sets as it steams.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce so it becomes glossy and coats the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and the sauce.

The step that matters

Dissolve cornstarch in cold water before adding it to the sauce. Cornstarch clumps if added as dry powder or to hot liquid without first being suspended in cold water. Once dissolved and stirred into the boiling sauce, it thickens evenly, so the sauce stays smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

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