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Dessert

Boiled Corn-meal Pudding, Without Eggs

A boiled pudding made from cornmeal, milk, molasses, suet, salt, and baking soda, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,243 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Boiled Corn-meal Pudding, Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large pot, bring 1 quart of milk to a boil.

  2. Stir in 1½ cups of well-sifted cornmeal and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  3. Add 1 cup of molasses, ½ cup of chopped suet, and 1 teaspoon of baking soda.

  4. Tie the mixture tightly in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 4 hours.

  2. Serve with sweet 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 + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 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

Cornmeal
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it a thick, firm, starchy structure as it cooks.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a rich, slightly sticky moistness.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long boiling.
Baking soda
Reacts to create gas bubbles that help the pudding rise and swell.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth with room to swell. Baking soda and the starch expand as the pudding cooks. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pudding cannot swell and may become dense or burst the cloth.

“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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