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Dessert

Hasty Pudding Fried

A fried pudding made by thickening pudding with cornmeal, refrigerating, slicing, dredging, and frying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding Fried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Add ½ cup cornmeal to 1 pint of pudding to thicken it.

  2. Boil the mixture, then pour it into a baking dish and press it down evenly.

  3. Refrigerate overnight, then cut into slices ⅓ inch thick.

Fry the slices

  1. Dredge flour over both sides of the slices.

  2. Fry in hot butter or lard in a frying pan until golden.

Make and fry the croquettes

  1. For croquettes, flour your hands and shape the mush into round, flattened balls.

  2. Dip each ball in a beaten egg, then coat with fine bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the croquettes in deep hot lard until golden.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Pudding
Forms the body of the dish and is set into a firm mass when chilled.
Cornmeal
Thickens the pudding so the mixture can be shaped and sliced.
Beaten egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the shaped croquettes.
Fine bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating on the croquettes when fried.

The step that matters

Refrigerate overnight before slicing. The cornmeal-thickened mixture must chill fully to set firm; cutting it too early produces soft slices that break or fall apart when dredged and fried.

“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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