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Dessert

Baked Indian Pudding

A baked pudding made with sweet milk, cornmeal, eggs, currants, raisins, and spices, topped with a lemon‑coconut sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Baked Indian Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baked Indian Pudding

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 pudding

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken the milk with cornmeal.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks, sugar, currants, raisins, salt, and cinnamon.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

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

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix cornstarch with a little cold water.

  2. Stir the mixture into boiling water and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and add lemon juice.

  4. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and powdered sugar.

  5. Add the beaten egg and nutmeg to the butter mixture.

  6. Combine the boiling mixture with the egg mixture until well blended.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

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

  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
Thickens the milk into a firm, spoonable pudding base as it cooks.
Eggs
Egg yolks and whites add richness and help set and lighten the baked pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornmeal thickens and the eggs set.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the sauce.
Cornstarch
Thickens the boiled sauce so it becomes smooth and pourable.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Egg whites hold air that gives the pudding lightness; vigorous stirring knocks that air out, leaving a denser result.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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