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Baked Indian Pudding

A baked cornmeal pudding with milk, molasses, raisins, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Baked Indian Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baked Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Stir cornmeal into cold milk.

  2. Add scalded milk, sugar, molasses, salt, cinnamon, ginger, beaten eggs, and raisins.

Bake

  1. Pour mixture into a buttered dish and bake for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour in cold milk and stir the pudding thoroughly.

  3. Return to the oven and bake slowly for about 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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Ginger + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 mixture as it cooks, giving the pudding its body.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the pudding into a soft, sliceable custard.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and moisture that the cornmeal absorbs and the eggs set in.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a deep, caramel-like flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps give the baked top a golden color.

The step that matters

Bake slowly for the full time. Cornmeal needs prolonged, gentle heat to fully swell and soften, and eggs need slow heating to set smoothly. Baking too hot or too briefly can leave the pudding grainy, watery, or curdled.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, molasses, cinnamon, egg, raisin):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, molasses, cinnamon, egg, raisin. 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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