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Dessert

Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made with a batter of sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, and vanilla or lemon, layered with raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat together the sugar and butter until creamy.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in the sweet milk, baking powder, salt, and lemon or vanilla extract.

Assemble and steam

  1. Grease a basin and layer raisins at the bottom.

  2. Pour the batter over the raisins and sprinkle the flour on top.

  3. Steam for 2 hours.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  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 the pudding sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, tenderising the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the butter cream into a light base.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure as the batter sets during steaming.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit in the base layer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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