Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A simple pudding made by boiling a batter of flour, eggs, milk, and salt in a butter‑greased basin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Boil a saucepan of warm water.

  2. In a basin, mix the flour with the salt.

  3. Break the eggs into the flour and beat well.

  4. Gradually add the milk, stirring until smooth.

  5. Let the batter stand for one hour.

  6. Grease a pudding basin with butter.

  7. Stir the batter and pour it into the basin.

Boil and serve

  1. Dip a pudding cloth in boiling water, wring it out, and flour it.

  2. Place the cloth over the batter and tie it securely with string.

  3. When the water is boiling, add the pudding and boil for one hour.

  4. Remove the basin from the saucepan, take off the cloth, and turn the pudding out onto a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 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).

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the batter as it sets during boiling.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set into a firm, tender pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and gives the batter its body.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth. The cloth must be tightly tied so boiling water cannot seep into the basin and dilute the batter. Floured, wrung-out cloth also keeps the pudding from sticking, so it can be turned out cleanly.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes