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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A sweet baked pudding with sugar, milk, flour, eggs, butter, baking powder, vanilla, and a sauce of boiling water, flour, butter, sugar, nutmeg, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. 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 oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, milk, flour, eggs, butter, baking powder, and vanilla until smooth.

  3. Pour batter into a shallow pan and bake until golden.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix boiling water with moistened flour, butter, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil, then flavor with nutmeg and lemon juice or vinegar.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 batter into a cake-like crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the pudding set as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, letting the batter rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in both the batter and the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the crust brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Flour thickens the sauce only when it is heated enough for its starch to swell and set. Stop short of a boil and the sauce stays thin and floury-tasting.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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