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Dessert

Baked Corn Meal Pudding, with Eggs

A baked cornmeal pudding made with milk, sugar, molasses, eggs, butter, spices, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Wheat and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 537 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Baked Corn Meal Pudding, with Eggs

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. Mix cornmeal and wheat flour with cold milk.

  2. Scald the milk and stir in the cornmeal mixture, cooking until thick.

  3. Thin the mixture with cold milk to a batter consistency.

  4. Add sugar, molasses, eggs, butter, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking soda.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

  2. After 30 minutes, stir the pudding thoroughly and finish baking.

  3. Serve hot with wine sauce or with butter and syrup.

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. Wheat + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

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

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 it cooks and absorbs liquid.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pudding as it bakes.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and a rich, slightly sharp flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to lighten the pudding and encourage browning.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a softer, more tender texture.
Wheat flour
Adds structure that helps the pudding hold together with the cornmeal.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture to batter consistency before adding the rest. Cornmeal thickens quickly as it cooks and absorbs liquid. A batter that is too thick will bake dense and dry, so it needs enough cold milk to loosen it before the other ingredients go in.

“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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