Skip to main content
Dessert

Oswego Baked Pudding

A sweet corn pudding made with Oswego corn, milk, cinnamon, lemon rind, sugar, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Oswego Baked Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix the corn with a little cold milk.

  2. Heat the quart of milk with cinnamon and lemon rind until nearly boiling.

  3. Stir in the corn mixture and boil for 4 minutes, stirring briskly.

  4. Remove the cinnamon and lemon rind, then let cool.

  5. Thoroughly stir in the beaten eggs.

Bake

  1. Pour into a buttered dish and bake until set.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Corn + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Set the pudding into a custard as they cook, giving it body and structure.
Oswego prepared corn
Thickens the milk as it boils, giving the pudding its body and texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the corn thickens and the eggs set.

The step that matters

Stir in the corn mixture and boil for 4 minutes, stirring briskly. The corn starch must be fully heated and kept moving so it thickens evenly without lumps or scorching on the bottom of the pan. Stirring also keeps the milk from catching before the eggs are added.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, milk, cinnamon, sugar, egg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk, cinnamon, sugar, egg, butter. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes