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Dessert

Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made with milk, sugar, eggs, flour, dried fruit, and served with a butter‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix milk, sugar, eggs, cream of tartar, baking soda, and enough flour to form a batter.

  2. Fold in dried fruit.

  3. Steam the mixture for 2 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, heat 1 pint of milk with butter until near boiling.

  2. Reserve ½ cup of the pudding batter, thin it, and stir it into the hot milk, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Sweeten and flavor the sauce to taste.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the body that holds the batter together as it steams.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and reacts with baking soda to help it rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce.
Dried fruit
Adds chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce as it thickens. The reserved batter is starch and egg-based, so it can clump if added to hot milk without constant stirring. Keeping it moving and thinned lets it disperse evenly and thicken into a smooth sauce.

“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.

More fruit pudding recipes

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