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Hasty Pudding

A quick cornmeal pudding cooked in salted water, served hot with butter and sugar or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add a generous amount of coarse sea salt to the boiling water.

Make the pudding

  1. Sift the meal into the water with your left hand while stirring vigorously with your right.

  2. Cook thoroughly until thickened.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter and sugar or syrup.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Meal (cornmeal or similar)
Starch that swells and thickens the water into a soft, porridge-like pudding as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the mild, plain cornmeal flavour.
Sugar or syrup
Adds sweetness to balance the savoury corn flavour.

The step that matters

Sifting the meal into the water. Adding meal all at once to boiling water clumps it into lumps; sifting it in slowly while stirring vigorously lets each grain hydrate separately so the pudding cooks smooth.

“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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