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Dessert

Baked Indian Pudding

A baked pudding made with cornmeal, milk, sugar, butter, raisins, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Indian Pudding

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 ↓

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 batter

  1. Stir the corn meal into the boiling milk.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add sugar, butter, raisins, and beaten eggs, and mix well.

  3. Pour into a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 hours.

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

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

  5. Corn + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Thickens the hot milk as it absorbs liquid, giving the pudding its body and soft, spoonable texture.
Eggs
Set as the pudding bakes, binding the mixture into a custard-like structure.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the corn meal cooks in and that gives the pudding moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and a softer, more tender crumb.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Beaten eggs added to a very hot cornmeal mixture can scramble and turn lumpy. Letting it cool first lets the eggs blend smoothly so they set evenly in the oven.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

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