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Preserve

Boiled Pudding

A boiled pudding made from eggs, milk, butter or lard, sugar, flour, and fruit.

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. Beat the eggs.

  2. Mix in the milk, butter or lard, and sugar.

  3. Gradually add flour until you achieve a stiff batter.

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

Boil

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

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

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 they set during boiling.
Flour
Forms the stiff batter's structure so the pudding holds its shape.
Butter or lard
Adds fat for a richer, more tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps flavour the pudding.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at a full boil. If the water drops below boiling, the pudding cooks slowly and can turn heavy and soggy. Keeping the water boiling steadily lets the batter set through and cook evenly.

“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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