Skip to main content
Dessert

Corn-meal or Indian Pudding

A sweet pudding made from cornmeal, milk, sugar, raisins, and eggs, topped with a butter‑sugar wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Corn-meal or Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Reserve ½ cup of sweet milk and bring the remaining milk to a boil.

  2. Wet the cornmeal with the reserved milk.

  3. Stir the wet cornmeal into the boiling milk, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  4. Add the sugar, butter, ginger, raisins, and finally the beaten eggs. Mix well.

  5. Bake for 45 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, cream together the butter, sugar, and egg until well combined.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and stir well. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the wine or brandy last and serve with the pudding.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 into a set, starchy base that gives the pudding its body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking, giving the pudding structure.
Raisins
Add moisture and chewy sweetness pockets throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps with browning on the baked surface.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornmeal into the boiling milk. Cornmeal can clump if added too fast or without constant stirring. Constant stirring disperses the starch so the mixture thickens smoothly.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, egg, butter, raisin, sauce, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, butter, raisin, sauce, flour. 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.

More cornmeal pudding recipes

Apple 11Eggless 9Indian 6Boiled 5Molasses 4 See all 145 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipes