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Dessert

Common Batter Pudding

A simple batter pudding made with eggs, flour, milk, and salt, boiled in a cloth.

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 ↓

Common Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly and mix with ½ pint of milk.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve and gradually add it to the flour, stirring until smooth.

  3. Thin the batter with another ½ pint of milk.

Boil and serve

  1. Flour a wet pudding cloth, pour in the batter, and tie it securely, leaving room for it to swell.

  2. Place the cloth in plenty of fast-boiling water and boil 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. Flour + milktop 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).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and set the pudding into a firm, sliceable texture as they cook.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together after boiling.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and keeps the batter moist and tender while it cooks.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth with room to swell. The batter expands as it heats and gives off steam. If the cloth is tied tightly, the pudding can be squeezed or burst, so leaving space lets it rise without breaking the seal.

“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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