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Dessert

Huckleberry Indian Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sweet milk, cornmeal, middlings, huckleberries, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Huckleberry Indian Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the sweet milk, corn meal, middlings, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Gently fold in the huckleberries, ensuring they are well dredged with flour.

  3. Oil a round pudding dish and pour in the batter.

Steam and serve

  1. Cover the dish and steam for 2.5 hours without lifting the lid.

  2. Serve warm with whipped cream or cream and sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  3. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Corn meal
Forms the thick, sturdy body of the pudding as it cooks.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the meal and gives the pudding its moist, custardy texture.
Huckleberries
Add bursts of fruit flavor and moisture throughout the pudding.
Middlings
Adds a coarse, grainy texture and body to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly during steaming.

The step that matters

Dredging the huckleberries in flour. Coating the berries with flour before folding them in helps keep them suspended in the batter rather than sinking to the bottom during the long steam.

“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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