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Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A boiled pudding made from flour, eggs, milk, and salt, cooked in a cloth-lined basin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Boiled Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a saucepan of warm water.

  2. In a bowl, mix 6 oz of flour with ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.

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

  4. Gradually add 1 pint of milk, stirring smoothly until mixed.

  5. Grease a pudding basin with butter.

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

Cloth and boil

  1. Wring out a pudding cloth in warm and then cold water, and flour it well.

  2. Cover the batter with the cloth and tie it securely with string just below the rim.

  3. When the water is boiling, place the pudding in and boil for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. To serve, 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 batter's structure as its starch sets during boiling.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm as it cooks.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter into a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth below the rim. A loose cloth lets boiling water seep into the basin and soak the batter. Tying it firmly just below the rim keeps the pudding sealed and its texture intact while it cooks.

“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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