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Dessert

Boiled Batter Pudding

A simple boiled pudding made from flour, salt, eggs, and milk.

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

Make the batter

  1. Boil a saucepan of water.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour and salt.

  3. Add the eggs to the flour and beat well.

  4. Gradually stir in the milk until the batter is smooth.

  5. Let the batter stand for 1 hour.

Prepare the basin

  1. Grease a pudding basin with butter.

  2. Stir the batter and pour it into the basin.

  3. Dip a pudding cloth in boiling water, wring it out, and flour it.

  4. Cover the batter with the cloth and tie it securely with string.

Boil and serve

  1. When the water is boiling, place the pudding in and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the basin from the saucepan, take off the cloth, and turn the pudding out onto a 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 structure of the batter as its starch sets during boiling.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set firm as it cooks.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and loosens the batter to a pourable, smooth consistency.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs into the flour. Beating well and stirring the milk in gradually keeps the batter smooth, so lumps of dry flour do not remain in the finished pudding.

“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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