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Dessert

Boiled Indian-meal Pudding

A pudding made from Indian meal, sweet milk, suet, eggs, and sugar, boiled for five hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Indian-meal Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar together.

  2. Heat the milk to boiling, then remove from heat.

  3. Gradually stir in the Indian meal, suet, and salt until well mixed.

  4. Allow the mixture to cool, then stir in the beaten yolks and sugar.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

Boil and serve

  1. Fill a pudding bag half full with the mixture.

  2. Cook in boiling water for five hours.

  3. Serve hot with sauce or 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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Indian meal
Forms the body of the pudding, thickening as it cooks and setting into a firm, sliceable texture.
Eggs
Bind the pudding, and the separately beaten whites add lightness to the mixture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long cooking.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that the meal absorbs and swells in, setting the base of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory richness of the suet and salt.

The step that matters

Fill the pudding bag only half full. Cornmeal keeps swelling as it cooks, so leaving room in the bag lets the pudding expand without bursting the bag or becoming dense and compressed.

“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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