Name: Sponge Pudding
Ingredients: Butter for greasing; Small sponge cakes; Wine for soaking; Rich cold custard

Why it works: Butter and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,645 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Sponge Pudding

Ingredients

Butter for greasing
Small sponge cakes
Wine for soaking
Rich cold custard

Directions

Prepare the mold

Grease a mold generously with butter.
Fill the mold three-quarters full with small sponge cakes soaked in wine.
Pour rich cold custard into the mold to fill it completely.

Cook and serve

Cover the mold with buttered paper and tie a floured cloth tightly over it.
Boil the mold for one hour.
Carefully turn out the pudding and pour cold custard over it.
Alternatively, bake the pudding and serve with wine sauce instead of custard.

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.

Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,645 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Small sponge cakes: Absorb the wine and form the soft, cake-like body of the pudding.
Wine: Soaks into the sponge cakes, adding moisture and flavour.
Rich cold custard: Fills the gaps around the cake and sets into a creamy, rich texture.

“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.