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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with milk, sugar, eggs, flour, dried fruit, and a butter‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine milk, sugar, eggs, cream of tartar, baking soda, and enough flour to form a batter. Fold in dried fruit.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased mold and steam for 2 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, heat 1 pint of milk with the butter until just below boiling.

  2. Take ½ cup of the pudding batter, thin it with a little milk, and stir it into the hot milk continuously until it thickens. Sweeten and flavor the sauce to your taste.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 help the pudding set as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with the baking soda to lift it.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps it rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to a tender crumb and browning.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and thickens the sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Stirring the batter into the hot milk for the sauce. Adding the thinned batter slowly while stirring constantly keeps the starch and egg from clumping, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

“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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