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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding made with sugar, milk, eggs, flour, butter, and leavening, topped with a butter‑sugar‑cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. 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 and bake the pudding

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

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, sweet milk, eggs, flour, butter, cream of tartar, and baking soda until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake until golden brown.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Add vanilla and fold in the whipped heavy cream gently.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding warm with the sauce drizzled on top.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 its proteins set during baking.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the pudding set and hold together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to release gas, helping the pudding rise.
Cream of tartar
Provides the acid that reacts with baking soda to leaven the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the crumb brown during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in both the batter and the sauce.

The step that matters

Fold in the whipped cream gently. Whipped cream holds air in a network of fat and protein. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, leaving the sauce dense instead of light and fluffy.

“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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