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Dessert

Plain Cup Pudding

A simple steamed or baked pudding made with flour, sugar, lemon rind, egg, milk, butter, and baking powder.

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 ↓

Plain Cup Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C) or prepare a steamer.

  2. Rub the butter into the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Add the sugar, baking powder, grated lemon rind, beaten egg, and milk.

  2. Mix until the batter is smooth like cake batter.

  3. Pour the mixture into buttered cups.

Cook and serve

  1. Steam for about 30 minutes or bake for 20 minutes until set.

  2. Turn out and serve with jam or lemon 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Flour
Forms the structure that sets the pudding as it cooks.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps it set firm when heated.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and stays light.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating the flour particles.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and sugar and adds moisture to the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps it brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Mix until the batter is smooth. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which can make the pudding tough and dense. Mix only until the batter is smooth so the texture stays tender and light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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