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Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made from flour, milk, and optional sugar, nutmeg, butter, served with jelly and sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Boiled Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

  1. Prepare the batter according to the Toad-in-the-Hole recipe, using slightly less milk.

  2. Grease a pudding basin that will be completely filled with the batter and heat it.

Boil the pudding

  1. Pour the batter into the hot basin and sprinkle a little flour on top.

  2. Tie a floured pudding cloth securely over the basin.

  3. Place the basin in a saucepan with boiling water and boil moderately for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Let the pudding stand for 2-3 minutes before turning it out.

  2. Garnish with bright-colored jelly and serve with sweet sauce.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as its starch and proteins set during boiling.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a richer flavor.

The step that matters

Boil moderately for the full 1.5 hours. Steam from a steadily boiling water bath cooks the batter evenly and sets it through. If the water drops to a weak simmer, the heat is too gentle to set the center, leaving the pudding heavy or undercooked.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, sugar, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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