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Dessert

Boiled Indian Pudding

A sweet pudding made from Indian meal, milk, butter, molasses, and baking soda, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift the Indian meal and mix it with salt.

  2. Boil the milk and gradually pour it into the meal, stirring until smooth.

  3. While hot, stir in the broken butter and then the molasses.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in a small amount of water and quickly beat it into the pudding until it effervesces.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered pudding boiler.

  2. Cover tightly and place in a kettle of boiling water.

  3. Cover the kettle and boil steadily for three hours.

  4. Carefully turn out the pudding.

  5. Serve with cream or butter.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Cornmeal forms the body of the pudding, thickening as it cooks and setting into a soft, spoonable texture.
Milk
Liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and, as it simmers, contributes a creamy richness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich mouthfeel and helps keep the cooked pudding moist and tender.
Molasses
Provides sweetness and deep flavour, and darkens the pudding as it steams.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses and fills the batter with bubbles, helping the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Beating in the baking soda. Baking soda must be dissolved and beaten in quickly so it releases gas evenly while the batter is still loose. Waiting lets the bubbles escape, leaving a dense pudding.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, molasses, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, molasses, cream. 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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