Skip to main content
Dessert

Common Batter Pudding

A simple pudding made by boiling a batter of eggs, milk, flour, and salt in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Common Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs thoroughly.

  2. Mix the eggs with half a cup of milk, then pass the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Gradually add the mixture to the flour and stir until the batter is smooth.

  4. Thin the batter with the remaining half cup of milk.

Boil and serve

  1. Flour a wet pudding cloth, pour the batter into the cloth and tie it securely.

  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. Milk + flourtop 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).

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
Bind the batter and set into a firm, tender pudding as they cook.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together after boiling.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Stir the batter smooth before thinning. Gradually adding the egg mixture to the flour prevents lumps, since flour clumps when liquid is poured in too quickly. A smooth batter cooks evenly and gives the pudding an even texture.

“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 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes