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Dessert

Boiled Corn-meal Pudding

A sweet pudding made from cornmeal, molasses, milk, eggs, suet or butter, and spices, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Boiled Corn-meal Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the molasses and milk together in a pot.

  2. Beat the eggs and gradually stir them into the molasses and milk mixture.

  3. Add the chopped beef suet or butter, and enough cornmeal to create a thick batter.

  4. Mix in the cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, and salt until well combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Dip a cloth into boiling water, shake off excess, and lightly flour it.

  2. Pour the mixture into the cloth, tie it up, leaving room for the pudding to swell.

  3. Boil the pudding for three hours.

  4. Serve hot with a sauce made of drawn butter, wine, and nutmeg.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Molasses + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 add structure as they set during cooking.
Cornmeal
Forms the thick body of the pudding and gives it its grainy texture.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and deep flavour to the pudding.
Beef suet or butter
Adds fat, which gives richness and a moist, tender crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses to lighten the batter and help it rise.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the cloth. The pudding swells as it cooks, so it needs space inside the cloth. A tightly tied cloth can restrict expansion and make the texture dense or split 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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