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Oatmeal Pudding

A pudding made by soaking oatmeal in boiling milk, then cooking with eggs and salt.

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 ↓

Oatmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the oatmeal

  1. Pour boiling milk over oatmeal and cover tightly.

  2. Let it soak overnight.

Make and boil the pudding

  1. Beat in the eggs and add salt.

  2. Grease a bowl that will hold the mixture and dust it with flour.

  3. Cover the bowl tightly with a floured cloth and boil for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter and salt, or with butter and syrup.

  2. When cold, slice any leftovers and toast them to eat as oat-cake with butter.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 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).

Butter and flour 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

Oatmeal
Absorbs the hot milk and forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the oats and keeps the pudding moist and soft.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set on heating to give a firmer structure.

The step that matters

Cover the bowl tightly with a floured cloth. A tight cover traps steam so the pudding cooks through evenly and does not dry out during the long boil. The flour dusting helps the cloth release cleanly from the 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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