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Dessert

Fruit Puff Pudding

A steamed dessert made with a soft batter, fruit, and a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Puff Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Gradually stir in milk until the mixture is very soft.

Steam

  1. Grease cups and place them in a steamer.

  2. Spoon a portion of the batter into each cup.

  3. Add a spoonful of berries or steamed apples on top.

  4. Cover with another spoonful of batter.

  5. Steam for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, beat together the eggs, butter, sugar, and boiling milk.

  2. Stir in the strawberries and serve with the pudding.

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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Flour
Forms the bulk of the batter, providing structure as it sets during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Eggs
Enrich the sauce and help it thicken and emulsify as it is beaten with the hot milk.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the tartness of the strawberries.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs into the boiling milk sauce. Adding hot milk to eggs too quickly can scramble them. Beating constantly while pouring in the hot milk gently warms the eggs so the sauce stays smooth and thickens.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, butter, egg, sugar. 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.

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