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Dessert

Indian Meal Pudding

A baked pudding made from milk, meal, eggs, sugar, and spices, served with a butter-sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Indian Meal 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. In a large pot, stir 1 quart of sifted meal into 1 quart of boiling milk.

  2. Add 1 quart of cold milk, 2 well beaten eggs, ½ teacup of sugar, a little salt, and spices to taste.

  3. Stir the mixture well and pour it into a buttered dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with hard sauce made by beating equal parts of butter and sugar until creamy.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set into a custard-like pudding as it bakes.
Meal
Provides the body and structure of the pudding as its starch thickens in the hot milk.
Milk
Supplies moisture and richness, and its proteins help the pudding set and brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps tenderize the texture of the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the meal into the boiling milk. Adding the meal to boiling milk lets its starch swell and thicken right away. Stirring well prevents lumps, so the batter bakes to an even, smooth texture.

“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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