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Dessert

Batter Pudding

A boiled pudding made from eggs, milk, sugar, flour, and salt, served with marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl.

  2. Add a little milk to the flour to mix smoothly.

Make the batter

  1. Add the remaining milk, beaten eggs, sugar, and salt to the mixture.

  2. Pour the batter into a buttered mold.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for one hour.

  2. Turn out the pudding and pour orange or lemon marmalade over it.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. 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
Set the batter as it cooks, giving the pudding a firm, custard-like structure.
Flour
Its starch thickens with the liquid and gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and keeps the pudding moist.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with a little milk first. Flour clumps when liquid is poured onto it all at once. Blending it into a smooth paste with a small amount of milk before adding the rest lets the starch hydrate evenly, so the batter cooks without lumps.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 batter pudding recipes

Boiled 71Baked 53Apple 30Steamed 30Fruit 19Meat 9 See all 241 →

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