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Sweet-Apple Pudding
One pint of scalded milk, half a pint of Indian meal, one small teacupful of finely-chopped suet, two teaspoonfuls of salt, six sweet apples cut in small pieces, one great-spoon of molasses, half a teaspoonful of ginger, nutmeg or cinnamon-whichever is most desirable-two eggs well beaten, and half a teaspoonful of soda. Beat all well together, put into a pudding-mould, and boil two hours.
A boiled cornmeal pudding of the New England type, steamed in a covered mould rather than baked. Most of the work is in the scalding and the mould.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal. Period Indian meal varied in grind, though a stone-ground yellow or white meal of fine to medium grind gives the smooth, close texture the recipe expects; a coarse polenta grind stays gritty after two hours.
- Scald the milk onto the mealScald the milk -- The recipe calls for scalded milk (heated to steaming, around 180F) but does not say when it meets the meal; pouring it over the half-pint of meal and letting it cool before the eggs go in is one reasonable reading, and swelling the meal first guards against a sandy pudding.
- A pint, a gill, a great-spoonA pint, a teacupful, a great-spoon -- One pint is 2 cups; half a pint of meal is 1 cup. A "great-spoon" is generally taken as a tablespoon. The "small teacupful" of suet is roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup — teacups of the period ran smaller than a modern measuring cup.
- The saltTwo teaspoonfuls in a pudding this size reads high to a modern palate, particularly with molasses and sweet apples. One teaspoon is closer to current taste.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, shredded or grated fine and kept cold. Packaged shredded suet works. Butter is the usual stand-in but melts differently and gives a denser, less open crumb.
- Sweet applesThe recipe means genuinely low-acid dessert apples of the old sweet class, not Baldwins or greenings. Golden Delicious or Gala come nearest; a tart apple will fight the molasses and, with the soda, shift the flavour.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon is there to work on the molasses, not to leaven the pudding much. Do not increase it — excess soda in a cornmeal batter tastes soapy and turns the crumb yellow-brown.
- Boiling the mouldGrease a 1.5- to 2-quart pudding basin or mould, fill it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a lid or pleated foil tied down, and stand it on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up so it never runs dry over the two hours.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Turn it out hot and serve with hard sauce, cream, or more molasses; it reheats well by steaming again for twenty minutes.
Sweet-apple pudding belongs to the long New England line of Indian-meal puddings, which carried cornmeal, molasses and suet through generations of American home cooking. Corn was the grain that was cheap and local, molasses the sweetener that arrived by ship, and a suet pudding boiled in a cloth or mould could be cooked over a fire without an oven, which mattered in kitchens that had one and used it sparingly. The insistence on sweet apples reflects an older orchard vocabulary: nineteenth-century growers distinguished sweet apples, eaten and cooked as they were, from sour or cider apples, and many named sweet varieties of the period have since dropped out of commerce.