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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A baked pudding of sugar, milk, eggs, flour, and baking powder, topped with a clear sauce of sugar, water, flour, butter, vinegar, and lemon flavor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 cup sugar, sweet milk, eggs, baking powder, butter, and flour until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

  2. For the sauce, combine 1 cup sugar, boiling water, and 1 tablespoon flour in a saucepan.

  3. Add butter, vinegar, and lemon flavor.

  4. Boil the sauce until it becomes clear.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding warm with the sauce poured over it.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 in the oven.
Flour
Forms the batter's structure as the starch sets during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the pudding rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the batter and the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and the sauce and helps brown the top.
Sweet milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour in the batter.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until it becomes clear. The flour in the sauce must be fully cooked with boiling water so its starch thickens the sauce and loses its raw floury taste. Stopping early leaves the sauce cloudy and starchy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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