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Dessert

Baked Fruit-Batter Pudding

A baked pudding made from a milk, flour, egg batter topped with fruit and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Baked Fruit-Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Butter a shallow pie dish.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk, flour, eggs, salt, and powdered sugar until smooth.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the batter into the prepared dish, filling it three-quarters full.

  2. Add enough fruit to cover the surface, pushing it into the batter but allowing it to float.

  3. Dot the top with small pieces of butter.

  4. Bake until the surface is crisp and light brown, about 25-30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Dust with sifted sugar before serving 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. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + plumtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the batter as it bakes and give the pudding its structure and rise.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it bakes into a firm, sliceable pudding rather than runny liquid.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and helps the batter brown on its surface.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top crisp and brown as it bakes.
Fruit
Adds moisture, tartness and flavour as it sits on and sinks slightly into the batter.

The step that matters

Pushing the fruit into the batter while letting it float. Fruit pressed partly into the batter keeps it anchored, while leaving the tops exposed lets the surface crisp and brown in the oven. Fruit fully submerged may sink and make the pudding soggy.

Swap the apple

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

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

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