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Dessert

Common Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made from eggs, milk, flour, and salt, cooked in a cloth.

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 ↓

Common Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly.

  2. Mix in ½ cup of milk.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Gradually add the egg mixture to the flour, stirring until smooth.

  5. Thin the batter with the remaining ½ cup of milk.

Prepare the cloth

  1. Prepare a wet pudding cloth.

  2. Flour the cloth well.

  3. Pour in the batter.

  4. Tie the cloth securely.

  5. Leave room for the pudding to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the pudding in boiling water.

  2. Cook for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately with wine sauce, hot fruit compote, or raspberry vinegar.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and set during cooking to give the pudding its structure.
All-purpose flour
Forms the starch and gluten network that gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Leave room for the pudding to swell. Flour batter expands as it cooks and heats. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pudding cannot rise and may burst or cook dense.

“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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