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Dessert

Half-hour Pudding

A quick cornmeal pudding made with butter, powdered sugar, egg yolks, cornmeal, and egg whites, baked and served hot with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Half-hour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Beat in the egg yolks thoroughly.

  3. Add the cornmeal and mix well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a well-buttered pudding dish and bake.

  2. Serve hot with sauce.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture by coating flour-like particles and carrying flavour.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the butter cream into a smooth, aerated base.
Egg yolks
Add richness and fat, and help bind the batter into a smooth mixture.
Cornmeal
Provides the main body and structure of the pudding as it sets in the oven.
Egg whites
Trap air when beaten, giving the pudding a light, lifted rise as it bakes.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites. Stirring vigorously deflates them, so the pudding bakes denser and rises less.

“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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