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Dessert

Half Hour Pudding

A quick baked pudding made with butter, sugar, cornmeal mush, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Half Hour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the cold mush and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the yolks of the eggs and then add them to the mixture.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately with brown sugar 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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps creaming hold air for a light texture.
Cold mush
Supplies the bulk and body of the pudding, giving it a soft, moist structure.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter, while whites set and add lift.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten whites hold air bubbles that give the pudding lift. Stirring vigorously deflates them, leaving a denser, flatter result after baking.

“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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