Skip to main content
Dessert

Corn Meal Custard Pudding

A custard pudding made with cornmeal, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, and salt.

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

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn Meal Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the corn meal and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Add the milk and stir until boiling.

  4. Cook over boiling water for 20 minutes.

  5. Remove from heat.

Finish and bake

  1. Beat in the yolks of the eggs, salt, and sugar.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding dish that has been dredged with sugar.

  4. Place the dish in a pan of boiling water.

  5. Bake until firm in the center.

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

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard and whites, folded in, lighten the texture as they set.
Corn meal
Starch that thickens the milk into a body that holds the pudding together.
Milk
Liquid that cooks with the corn meal to form the custard base.
Butter
Fat that adds richness and a tender mouthfeel to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the custard's texture.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites hold air only when beaten stiff and folded gently; overmixing deflates them, leaving a denser pudding. Letting the base cool slightly first helps keep the foam intact.

“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

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes