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Dessert

Scalded or Cumberland Pudding

A milk and flour pudding boiled, beaten with eggs, then boiled in cloth, served with butter and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Scalded or Cumberland Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the salt and gradually add flour until the mixture resembles hasty pudding.

  3. Boil for 3 minutes, then pour into a basin.

Cook and serve

  1. Once cool, add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  2. Boil the mixture in a clean cloth for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with melted butter and currant jelly.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a batter.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a stiff batter that holds the pudding together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and give it a firmer, set structure when cooked.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture in a clean cloth for 1 hour. The pudding must be wrapped tightly and kept at a steady boil for the full hour. Water that stops boiling or enters the cloth can make the pudding soggy and unevenly set.

“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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