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Dessert

Indian Meal Pudding

A pudding made from milk, suet, meal, flour, salt, sugar, and spices, baked slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Indian Meal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Bring the milk and chopped suet to a boil in a large pot over medium heat.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in enough meal to create a thin batter.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

Season and bake

  1. Add the flour and season with salt, sugar, and spices.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 300°F (150°C) for three to four 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.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the meal thickens and bakes into a pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist during long baking.
Meal
Provides the starch and body that thickens the liquid into a pudding.
Flour
Adds extra starch to help the pudding set and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Bake low and slow. Cornmeal starch needs prolonged gentle heat to swell and set fully, and a low oven keeps the milk from scorching or the custard from curdling into a rough 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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