Skip to main content
Main

Hasty Pudding

A pudding made from Indian meal, sweet milk, and optional eggs, baked or simmered with bread or biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the mush

  1. In a kettle of boiling water, add a pinch of coarse sea salt.

  2. Slowly stir in enough Indian meal to make a mush thicker than sponge cake batter.

Bake

  1. Butter a tin pan or pudding dish and pour in the mush.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 1 to 2 hours.

  3. If the oven is too hot, place a brick beneath and a pan over the mush.

Variations

  1. For variation, beat together 2 eggs and 1 cup of sweet milk, then stir into the mush before pouring it into the pan.

  2. For another variation, stir in a cup of well‑cooked dried apples or other dried fruit into the batter.

  3. For a bread pudding, lay slices of bread or biscuit in a deep dish.

  4. Beat 1 to 3 eggs and stir them into 1.5 pints of sweet milk, sweeten and flavor as desired, then pour over the bread.

  5. Simmer until the bread is soft, but do not boil.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Cornmeal thickens with boiling water into a mush that sets as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the optional custard variation and help it set into a firmer pudding.
Butter
Greases the pan so the baked mush releases cleanly and browns lightly.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the bread in the bread pudding variation.

The step that matters

Stirring in the Indian meal. Adding the meal slowly into boiling water lets starch granules hydrate evenly, preventing lumps and giving a smooth mush that thickens properly.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, milk, bread, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, milk, bread, sugar. 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.

More hasty pudding recipes

Fried 7Baked 5 See all 52 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes