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Dessert

Boiled Indian Pudding

A boiled pudding made from Indian meal, milk, butter, molasses, and baking soda, served with cream or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make 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, beating well.

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

  5. Immediately pour the mixture into a well-buttered pudding boiler.

  6. Optionally, mix in fruit before boiling.

Boil and serve

  1. Cover tightly and place the boiler in a kettle of boiling water.

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

  3. Carefully turn out the pudding and 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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Molasses + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together970 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Forms the bulk and structure of the pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Hydrates the meal into a smooth, soft batter and adds richness.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and rich flavor.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and a deep caramel-like flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to produce gas that lightens the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda. Baking soda must be beaten in quickly, while the mixture is still hot and fluid, so the gas bubbles disperse evenly through the batter before it sets. Delay lets the reaction fizzle out, 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):

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

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