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Dutch Pudding

A yeasted butter and milk batter with flour, eggs, sugar, currants baked into a golden pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Dutch Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in the milk and let it cool to lukewarm.

  2. Strain the mixture into the flour.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and yeast, then mix well.

  4. Let the batter rise for 1 hour in a warm place.

Bake and serve

  1. Stir in the moist sugar and currants.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered dish or tin.

  3. Bake until golden, then turn out 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the pudding its structure.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking, adding structure and richness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the batter, producing gas that makes it rise.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the batter.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the surface brown during baking.

The step that matters

Cool the butter and milk to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so the melted butter and milk must be lukewarm before they meet the yeast. Warm, not hot, conditions then let the yeast produce gas that raises the batter during the rise.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, flour, egg, 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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