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Dessert

Baked Indian Pudding

A sweet pudding made with milk, cornmeal, sugar, eggs, ginger, salt, butter, and whey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding base

  1. Bring the sweet milk to a boil.

  2. Stir in the cornmeal while hot.

  3. Beat the eggs with the sugar and add to the mixture.

  4. Add ginger, salt, and butter, then mix well.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1 hour at 400°F (200°C).

  2. Stir in some cold milk to make whey.

  3. Bake for 2 more 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. Sugar + wheytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  3. Butter + wheytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Cornmeal
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding structure and richness.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornmeal thickens and the eggs set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning during the long bake.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the cornmeal while the milk is hot. Cornmeal must be added to boiling milk so its starch can swell and thicken the mixture evenly; added to cool milk it clumps and leaves a grainy texture.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

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