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Boiled Pudding

A sweet pudding made from eggs, milk, butter or lard, sugar, flour, and optional fruit, boiled in a cloth bag.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Boiled Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, butter or lard, and sugar.

  2. Add flour gradually until you achieve a stiff batter.

  3. Sift in the green or dry fruit and mix well.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the batter into a cloth bag and tie it securely.

  2. Boil the bag in water for two hours, ensuring the water remains boiling hot.

  3. Serve with a sauce made of butter and sugar.

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. 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the pudding sets.
Flour
Provides the body that turns the batter stiff and holds the pudding together.
Butter or lard
Adds fat, giving the pudding richness and a tender texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding taste rounded.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling for the full two hours. The cloth bag must stay in actively boiling water throughout. If the water cools, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy, because the batter sets slowly at lower temperatures.

“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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