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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A simple baked cake made with butter, sugar, egg, milk, flour, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar, then mix in the beaten egg.

  2. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk to the butter mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered cake pan and bake for 35 minutes.

  2. Serve with lemon or 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 + 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb and carries flavor.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and richness to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its starches set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and gives the batter its moisture and softness.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps it brown lightly and stay tender.

The step that matters

Alternating dry ingredients with milk. Adding the flour mixture in portions alternating with the milk keeps the batter smooth and well emulsified. Overmixing after the flour is added develops gluten, which can make the pudding 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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