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Hasty Pudding

A simple cornmeal pudding boiled in water, seasoned with salt, served with milk or molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Rye and milk work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 918 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil 1 quart of water in a kettle.

  2. Sift ½ cup of cornmeal or rye meal into a bowl.

Cook the pudding

  1. Stir the sifted meal into the water and pour the sifted meal into the kettle.

  2. Stir the mixture well.

  3. Let the mixture boil until thick.

  4. Add salt to taste.

  5. Sprinkle more meal handful by handful, stirring continuously.

  6. Cook for about 30 minutes until it thickens to a difficult stirring consistency.

Serve

  1. Serve with milk or molasses.

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. Rye + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together918 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal or rye meal
Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch swells and gelatinizes in boiling water.
Water
Hydrates the meal so its starch can swell and thicken the mixture as it cooks.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the meal gradually while stirring constantly. Adding meal all at once forms lumps as the outer starch swells before the inside hydrates. Adding it handful by handful while stirring keeps the mixture smooth as it thickens.

“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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