Skip to main content
Dessert

Millet Pudding

A baked or boiled pudding made from millet, milk, eggs, and flavored with lemon rind or spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Millet Pudding

Why it works: Millet and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Millet 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.

Prepare

  1. Wash the millet before boiling.

Make the custard

  1. Simmer the millet in nearly 1 quart of milk over low heat for 15 minutes, stirring carefully.

  2. Add the thin rind of lemon, cinnamon, or nutmeg for flavor.

  3. Once cooled, sweeten the mixture and stir in the beaten eggs.

Bake or boil

  1. Fill a well-buttered pie dish with the mixture and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 1 hour, or boil in a well-buttered basin for 1.5 hours.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Millet + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Millet
Forms the bulk of the pudding and thickens as it simmers in the milk.
Milk
Cooks the millet and forms the liquid base of the custard.
Eggs
Set when heated, giving the pudding its firm, custard-like structure.

The step that matters

Stirring in the eggs after cooling. Adding beaten eggs to very hot mixture can scramble them. Letting the mixture cool first helps the eggs blend smoothly and set evenly during baking.

Swap the millet

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, egg, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Milletthe original

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes