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Dessert

Rhubarb Pudding

A baked rhubarb dish with a cake-like batter, served upside down with cream and sugar.

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

Rhubarb Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop enough rhubarb to nearly fill your baking dish and sprinkle sugar over it.

  2. In another bowl, mix sour milk, eggs, butter, baking soda, and enough flour to make a cake batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Spread the batter over the rhubarb and bake until done.

  2. Turn out onto a platter upside down and serve with cream and sugar.

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. Rhubarb + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Rhubarb
Provides the tart fruit base that softens and bakes under the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the rhubarb and helps draw out its juices as it cooks.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to lighten the batter and adds tenderness.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give it structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to produce gas that makes the batter rise.
Flour
Forms the cake batter's structure as its proteins set during baking.

The step that matters

Turn out onto a platter upside down. The rhubarb is cooked under the batter, so the pudding must cool briefly before inverting; turning it out while very hot or too soon can cause it to collapse or stick.

Swap the rhubarb

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, milk, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Rhubarbthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, egg, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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