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Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A steamed pudding made from flour, eggs, milk, and salt, cooked in a butter‑greased basin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Boiled Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil water in a saucepan.

  2. Mix flour and salt in a bowl.

  3. Beat eggs into the flour mixture.

  4. Gradually stir in milk until smooth.

  5. Grease a pudding basin with butter.

  6. Stir batter and pour into basin.

Boil and serve

  1. Wring out a pudding cloth in warm and cold water, then flour it well.

  2. Cover batter with cloth and tie with string below rim.

  3. Boil pudding in boiling water for 1.5 hours.

  4. Remove basin, discard cloth, turn pudding onto hot dish.

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. Flour + milktop 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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure as it sets during boiling.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm as it cooks.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the flour into a smooth batter.

The step that matters

Covering the batter with the floured cloth. The cloth must be wrung out and floured well so it does not stick to the pudding and so steam can cook the batter evenly. Tying it securely below the rim keeps water out of the basin during the long boil.

“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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