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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding made with sugar, milk, butter, eggs, flour, and baking powder, served with a nutmeg‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish and bake for 30 minutes.

  2. For the sauce, combine sugar, butter, hot water, flour, vinegar, and nutmeg in a saucepan.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly until thickened.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake and thickens the sauce.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and turns light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake and sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and sauce and helps the cake brown.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and helps it blend smoothly.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce until thickened. Flour thickens only when heated with liquid and stirred, so the sauce can turn lumpy if it is not stirred constantly while it comes to a boil.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

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