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Dessert

Steamed Indian Pudding

A steamed pudding made from sweet milk, cornmeal, rye meal, Graham flour, sugar or molasses, raisins, and leavening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dredge the raisins with a little of the flour.

  2. Scald the corn meal with boiling water and let it cool.

  3. Mix the cream of tartar into the Graham flour.

Make the batter

  1. Add the Graham flour and rye meal to the cooled corn meal.

  2. Stir in the sweet milk until a pourable batter forms.

  3. Add the sugar (or molasses) and dissolved baking soda, then beat until light.

  4. Fold in the dredged raisins.

  5. Pour the batter into an oiled pan or mold, leaving room to swell.

Steam

  1. Cover and place in a steamer; steam for three to four hours without opening.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Corn + ryetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse corn meal
Forms the main body and coarse, sturdy texture of the pudding.
Graham flour
Adds structure and a nutty, wholesome flavor to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Cream of tartar
Supplies the acid that activates the baking soda, helping the pudding rise.
Sugar or molasses
Provides sweetness and moisture, and helps the pudding brown and stay tender.
Sweet milk
Moistens the dry ingredients into a batter and keeps the pudding soft.

The step that matters

Steam without opening the cover. Lifting the lid lets steam escape and the temperature drop, which can stop the rising gas from expanding the batter and leave the pudding heavy or sunken.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, corn, rye, flour, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, rye, flour, sugar, cream. 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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