Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Corn-meal Pudding, Without Eggs

A boiled pudding of cornmeal, milk, molasses, suet and baking soda, made without eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the pudding

  1. Stir the cornmeal, salt, molasses, chopped suet, and dissolved baking soda into the boiling milk.

  2. Tie the mixture tightly in a cloth, allowing room for it to swell.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 4 hours.

  2. Serve with sweet sauce.

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 + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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
Forms the main body of the pudding and sets as it cooks, giving it a firm, sliceable texture.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a dark color, and its acidity reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to produce gas that lightens the pudding and helps it rise.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives it a rich, tender mouthfeel.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the cornmeal so it can cook into a soft, set pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture with room to swell. Cornmeal and the baking soda gas expand during boiling. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pudding cannot swell, so it may burst the cloth or turn out dense.

“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.

You might also like

Molasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesMolasses Sponge CakeMolasses Sponge Cake9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes