Name: Boiled Indian Pudding
Ingredients: 2 cups Indian meal; 1 cup sour milk; 1 teaspoon baking soda; ½ cup molasses; ¼ teaspoon salt; ½ cup suet, chopped fine

Why it works: Milk and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,243 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

In a bowl, mix the Indian meal with sour milk and baking soda.
Add molasses, salt, and chopped suet to the mixture.
Pour the mixture into a pot and boil for four 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.

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.

Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,243 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal: Provides the starchy, porridge-like body that holds the pudding together.
Sour milk: Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Molasses: Adds sweetness, depth of flavor, and a dark color.
Suet: Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.

“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.