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Dessert

Corn-bread Pudding

A baked pudding made from cornmeal, flour, eggs, milk, butter, sugar, spices, and leavening agents.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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-bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, rub together the melted butter and sugar.

  2. Beat in the egg yolks, then add the milk and spices.

  3. Mix the white Indian meal with the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda, then add to the wet mixture.

  4. Beat the mixture hard for five minutes.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered mold with a lid.

  2. Set the mold in a pot of boiling water, ensuring the water does not reach the top.

  3. Boil steadily for two hours.

  4. Turn out, cut into slices, and serve with butter and sugar.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

White indian meal
Provides the cornmeal body and characteristic grainy texture of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during cooking to give the pudding its firm structure.
All-purpose flour
Adds starch that helps the pudding hold its shape after steaming.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Cream of tartar
Acts with the baking soda as a leavening acid, helping the pudding rise.

The step that matters

Keep the water below the lid of the mold. If the boiling water reaches the top of the mold, it can seep in and make the pudding soggy and waterlogged. Steady gentle boiling keeps the steam cooking the pudding evenly.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, milk, butter, sugar, cream, 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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