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Dessert

Common Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made from eggs, milk, flour, and salt, served with wine sauce, fruit compote, or raspberry vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Common Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly and mix with the milk.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Gradually add the mixture to the flour, stirring until smooth.

  4. Thin the batter with another ½ pint of milk.

Cook and serve

  1. Prepare a wet pudding cloth by shaking it out and flouring it well.

  2. Pour the batter into the cloth, leaving room for it to swell, and tie it securely.

  3. Place the cloth in boiling water and cook for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

  4. Serve immediately with wine sauce, hot fruit compote, or raspberry vinegar.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Set the pudding and give it structure as they cook.
Flour
Forms the batter's body and gives the pudding its firm structure.
Milk
Provides moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the cloth for the pudding to swell. Flour batter expands as it cooks and the starches set. If the cloth is packed tightly, the pudding cannot rise and may burst or cook 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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