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Dessert

Sponge Pudding

A baked pudding made from stale sponge cake, raisins, currants, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a tin mold with a chimney well with butter.

  2. Flatten the raisins and layer them thickly in the mold.

  3. Crumble the sponge cake into the mold and add the currants.

Make and steam the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs and milk as you would for a custard. Pour the egg and milk mixture into the mold.

  2. Cover the mold tightly and boil for 45 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from the pot and place the mold in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for a few minutes.

  2. For sauce, prepare a thin boiled custard.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the egg and milk to set into a soft crumb.
Eggs
Set the milk mixture as it cooks, giving the pudding its custard-like structure.
Milk
Combines with the eggs to form the custard that binds the pudding together.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture in the bottom layer.

The step that matters

Covering the mold tightly while boiling. A loose cover lets steam escape and water enter the mold, so the pudding can turn soggy or uneven. A tight seal keeps steam circulating so the egg custard cooks evenly through the cake.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, milk, egg, butter. 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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