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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Cottage 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.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Rub together the butter and sugar in a bowl.

  3. Beat in the egg yolks.

  4. Add the milk and baking soda.

  5. Mix in the salt.

  6. Add the beaten egg whites alternately with the flour.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered mold.

  2. Bake until golden.

  3. Turn out onto a dish.

  4. Cut into slices.

  5. Serve with vanilla sauce.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding's crumb once baked.
Eggs
Add structure and lift, especially the beaten whites folded into the batter.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating the flour with fat.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the batter to release gas that makes it rise.
Cream of tartar
Acid that works with baking soda to produce gas for lift.

The step that matters

Add the beaten egg whites alternately with the flour. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the beaten whites, which lifts the pudding. Overmixing deflates the foam and makes the texture dense and tough.

“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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