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Dessert

Corn Cottage Pudding

A baked cornmeal pudding with sugar, milk, lard, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Cottage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Mix the baking powder and salt into the cornmeal flour.

  3. Add the sugar and beaten egg yolks, then the melted lard and milk.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites until smooth.

  5. Pour the mixture into a buttered round tin basin.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for about 20 minutes until done.

  2. Serve hot with a liquid 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg whites trapped by folding add lift and a light, airy crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Cornmeal flour
Provides the main structure and the characteristic grainy, corn-flavoured crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps brown the surface as it bakes.
Lard
Adds fat for moisture and a tender, rich texture.
Milk
Hydrates the cornmeal and adds moisture and richness to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites. Stirring hard knocks that air out, so the pudding bakes denser and rises less.

“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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