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A Boiled Indian Pudding

A boiled pudding made with buttermilk, flour, cornmeal, apples, served warm with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

A Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine buttermilk, flour, cornmeal, salt, and chopped apples.

  2. Wet a cloth bag and fill it with the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the bag in water for 2 hours.

  2. Serve the pudding warm with sugar and cream.

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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Buttermilk + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the thick, sliceable body of the pudding as it cooks and sets.
Buttermilk or sour milk
Adds tang and moisture, and its acid helps the cornmeal soften as it cooks.
Flour
Adds structure so the mixture holds together in the cloth bag.
Sour apples
Add moisture and tartness that balances the sweetness of the sugar served with it.

The step that matters

Wet the cloth bag. A wet cloth keeps the pudding from sticking and forming a crust on the outside, so it releases cleanly and cooks evenly in the boiling water.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (buttermilk, flour, sugar, cream):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against buttermilk, flour, sugar, cream. 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.

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