Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Corn Meal Pudding, Without Eggs

A boiled pudding made from cornmeal, milk, molasses, suet, and baking soda, served with sweet sauce.

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. Bring 1 quart of milk to a boil in a large pot.

  2. Stir in 1½ cups sifted Indian meal and 1 teaspoon salt.

  3. Add 1 cup molasses, ½ cup chopped suet, and 1 teaspoon dissolved baking soda.

  4. Tie the mixture tightly in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

Cook 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

Indian meal
Cornmeal forms the thick body of the pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and gives the pudding a soft, moist texture.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a rich, slightly acidic flavor.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to lighten the pudding and help it rise.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth with room to swell. Cornmeal and baking soda expand as they cook, so the cloth must be loose enough for the pudding to rise. Tying it too tightly can cause it to burst or cook 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