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Dessert

Corn-meal Hasty Pudding

A sweet, spiced cornmeal porridge cooked in milk and water and served hot with sugar and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix cornmeal with boiling water until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk.

  3. Cook in a farina kettle for 30 minutes, stirring often.

  4. Add salt, brown sugar, butter, and spices; cook for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour into a bowl or uncovered dish.

  2. Serve hot with sugar and butter.

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

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

  2. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cornmeal
Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch swells and sets in the hot liquid.
Milk
Adds richness and a soft, creamy texture to the cooked pudding.
Butter
Contributes fat for a smoother mouthfeel and rich flavor.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavor.

The step that matters

Mixing the cornmeal into the boiling liquid. Cornmeal can clump when stirred into hot liquid without first being smoothed out. Mixing it with boiling water into a smooth paste before adding it to the milk helps it disperse evenly and keeps the pudding lump-free.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, sugar, cinnamon. 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.

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