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Dessert

Batter Fruit Pudding

A pudding made by baking apples in a batter of flour, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Batter Fruit Pudding

Why it works: Milk and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Batter Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a basin that holds 1½ pints and fill it nearly to the brim with boiling apples.

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, eggs, and milk to create a batter.

  3. Pour the batter over the apples in the basin.

  4. Tie a buttered and floured cloth over the basin.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Turn the pudding onto a hot dish and sprinkle sugar over it before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Forms the batter that sets around the apples into a light, firm pudding.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the batter and gives the pudding a tender crumb.
Boiling apples
Provide the fruit base and moisture that the batter cooks around.

The step that matters

Filling the basin nearly to the brim with apples. Packing the apples tightly leaves little room for the batter to rise and spread, so the pudding can turn out dense or uneven. Pouring the batter over tightly packed fruit helps it settle into the gaps and bind everything together as it cooks.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

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