Why it works: Milk and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,243 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓
Boiled Corn-meal Pudding, Without Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Mix and tie
Stir the cornmeal, salt, molasses, chopped suet, and dissolved baking soda into the boiling milk in a large pot.
Tie the mixture tightly in a cloth, allowing room for it to swell.
Boil and serve
Boil for four hours.
Serve with sweet sauce.
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.
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Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together7,243 recipes
Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cornmeal (in the method)
- Forms the thick body of the pudding as it cooks in the hot milk.
- Suet
- Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
- Molasses
- Provides sweetness, dark color, and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
- Baking soda
- Reacts with the acidity of molasses to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
The step that matters
Leave room in the cloth. The mixture swells as it cooks, so it must be tied with space to expand. Packing it too tightly can restrict the swelling and make the pudding dense or cause the cloth to burst.
“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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