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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding with a buttery sauce made from sugar, butter, flour, egg, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together 1 cup of sugar and 2 teaspoons of butter. Add 1 cup of sweet milk, 2 cups of flour, 3 teaspoons of baking powder, and 1 egg. Mix well.

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

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of butter, 1 tablespoon of flour, and the yolk of 1 egg in a saucepan.

  2. Boil 1 pint of water, then stir in the egg and sugar mixture.

  3. Pour the sauce over the beaten egg white and serve.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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
Provides the structure that sets the pudding as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the pudding rise and turn light.
Egg
Adds structure and richness, helping the pudding set as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake and sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Folding the sauce over the beaten egg white. The record's sauce step mentions a beaten egg white that never appears in the ingredient list or earlier steps, so the cook must decide how it is added. Egg proteins set with heat, so the sauce should be poured over gently and not stirred in hard, to keep the sauce and the egg white distinct.

“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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