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Dessert

Boiled Indian Pudding

A boiled pudding made from sour milk, eggs, baking soda, cornmeal, and dried fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk, beaten eggs, and baking soda.

  2. Sift in cornmeal until the mixture is the consistency of pancake batter or slightly thicker.

  3. Stir in the dried fruit.

Boil

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth bag and boil for 1 hour.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda, producing gas that lightens the pudding.
Eggs
They bind the batter and help it set into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Baking soda
It reacts with the acid in the sour milk to create bubbles that help the pudding rise.
Cornmeal
Its starch thickens with heat and liquid, giving the pudding its body and texture.
Dried fruit
It adds sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adjusting the cornmeal to consistency. The batter must be about the thickness of pancake batter or slightly thicker before boiling. Too much liquid leaves the pudding loose and unable to set, while too much cornmeal makes it dense and stiff, since the starch thickens as it cooks.

“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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