Name: Cornmeal Pudding
Ingredients: ¾ pound beef suet, finely chopped; 1 pint boiling water; 1 quart cornmeal; ½ cup molasses; 1 teaspoon salt

Why it works: Beef and molasses work together. They rank in the top 35% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 606 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cornmeal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop the beef suet finely.
Pour boiling water over the cornmeal and mix well.
Add the chopped suet, molasses, and salt to the mixture.

Cook and serve

Place the mixture into a pudding bag.
Boil for three hours.
Serve with sauce or butter.

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.

Beef + molassestop 35% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together606 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet: Fat that melts during cooking, keeping the pudding moist and rich.
Cornmeal: Its starch swells in the hot water and sets to form the pudding's body.
Molasses: Adds sweetness, moisture, and a dark color and deep flavor.

“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.