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Preserve

Half-hour Pudding

A quick cornmeal pudding baked with butter, sugar, eggs, and cornmeal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Half-hour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Beat in the egg yolks thoroughly.

  3. Add the cornmeal and mix well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered pudding dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  3. Serve hot with 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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender texture.
Powdered sugar
Creams with the butter and adds sweetness while keeping the crumb fine and tender.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the fat, helping the pudding hold together as it sets.
Cornmeal
Provides the main body and grainy texture as the starch sets during baking.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add lightness and lift to the set pudding.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites, which gives the pudding its light texture. Stirring hard would deflate the foam and leave it 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.

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