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Dessert

Dutch Pudding

A yeast-leavened pudding made with butter, milk, flour, eggs, brown sugar, and currants, baked until golden.

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 ↓

Dutch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter in the milk and let it cool to lukewarm.

  2. Strain the mixture into the flour.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and yeast, then mix well.

  4. Let the batter rise for 1 hour in a warm place.

Bake and serve

  1. Stir in the brown sugar and currants.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered dish or tin.

  3. Bake until golden, then turn out before serving.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter once the liquids are added.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure as they set.
Yeast
Produces gas during the rise, giving the pudding a light, airy crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing tenderness and flavour.
Currants
Add sweetness and fruity pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise for 1 hour in a warm place. Yeast needs warmth to activate and produce carbon dioxide. If the batter is too cold or the milk mixture was too hot when the yeast went in, the rise will be weak and the pudding dense.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, flour, egg, sugar. 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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