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Dessert

Boiled Indian Pudding

A pudding made from Indian meal, milk, eggs, suet, cinnamon, molasses, and baking soda, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,655 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Heat the milk until scalding.

  2. Add the suet and Indian meal to the milk.

  3. Once the suet is melted, mix in the cinnamon and molasses, and let the mixture cool completely.

  4. Beat in the eggs vigorously.

  5. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold with a tight lid.

Steam and serve

  1. Boil steadily for 4 hours.

  2. Dip the mold in cold water for 1 minute to loosen the pudding.

  3. Turn out onto a hot dish and serve with butter and sugar or hard sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Cinnamon + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Egg + cinnamontop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,058 recipes

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

Egg and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,058 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pudding into a firm, sliceable texture.
Indian meal
Provides the body of the pudding, thickening the milk as it cooks.
Milk
Supplies liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and keeps the pudding moist.
Powdered suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding tender.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and deep flavor, and darkens the pudding.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool completely before beating in the eggs. Eggs added to a very hot mixture can scramble or cook unevenly, leaving lumps and an uneven set in the finished pudding.

“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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