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Dessert

Baked Suet Indian Pudding

A baked pudding made with milk, molasses, suet or butter, cinnamon, and Indian meal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked Suet Indian 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 pudding base

  1. Boil 2 cups of milk and add ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  2. Dissolve 1 cup of Indian meal in water and stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Set the mixture aside to cool.

Finish and bake

  1. Once cooled, add 1 cup of molasses, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 cup of suet or butter, and the remaining 1 cup of cold milk.

  2. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2.5 hours.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Molasses + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. 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

Indian meal
Cornmeal thickens as its starch swells in the hot milk, giving the pudding its body.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, depth of flavor, and a dark brown color during baking.
Suet or butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Milk
Provides liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and keeps the pudding moist.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and spice flavor.

The step that matters

Dissolving the cornmeal before stirring it into the boiling milk. Cornmeal clumps when dropped dry into hot liquid because its outer starch gels instantly and traps the dry inside. Dissolving it in water first and stirring it in steadily spreads the starch evenly so the base thickens smoothly.

“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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