Name: Baked Indian Pudding
Ingredients: 1 quart milk; 1½ cups cornmeal; ½ cup molasses; ½ pound suet; 1 tablespoon salt; 1 pint cold milk

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 ↓

Baked Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

Boil the milk in a large pot.
Stir in the cornmeal, molasses, suet, and salt.
Add the cold milk and mix well.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

Bake and serve

Bake at 300°F (150°C) for five hours.
Serve with hard sauce made from butter and sugar.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

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

Milk: Liquid that the cornmeal cooks into a thick, spoonable pudding body.
Cornmeal: Starch that thickens the milk and gives the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.
Molasses: Adds sweetness, deep color, and a caramel-like flavor.
Suet: Adds fat that keeps the baked pudding moist and tender.

“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.