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Dessert

Fried Hasty Pudding

A cornmeal pudding fried in beef drippings after boiling and cooling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the cornmeal with cold water until smooth and lump-free.

  2. Gradually stir the mixture into boiling salted water.

  3. Add more cornmeal if needed to achieve the right consistency, but do not make it too stiff.

  4. Cook for 1 hour, stirring occasionally, until fully cooked.

  5. Pour the mixture into a brick-loaf pan and let it cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Once set, cut into slices about ¾ inch thick.

  2. Fry the slices on a greased griddle until golden brown.

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. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch thickens and sets when cooked.
All-purpose flour
Adds extra starch to help the mixture hold its shape when cooled and sliced.
Beef drippings
Provides fat for frying, which conducts heat and browns the slices to a golden crust.

The step that matters

Adding the cornmeal to the boiling water. Stirring the mixture in gradually and keeping it smooth prevents lumps, which form when starch meets hot water too quickly. Stopping at the right thickness matters, because a stiff mix will not slice cleanly and a thin one will not set.

“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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