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Baked Indian Pudding
3 1/2 quarts milk, 3 tablespoons cornmeal, 1/2 pint molasses, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon ginger. Boil 1 quart milk; add to it molasses, Crisco, salt, and spices, and lastly meal stirred smooth with little cold milk; scald whole together, and turn into a well Criscoed baking dish.
When it begins to crust over, stir it all up from bottom, and add 1 pint of cold milk. Repeat process every 1/2 hour, or oftener if pudding browns too fast, till 5 pints are used; then let it bake till done-6 hours in all. Serve hot with sauce of grated or granulated maple sugar stirred into rich cream, and kept very cold till needed.
A six-hour slow-baked pudding of the New England type, rewritten here to sell shortening. Two things in the ingredient list need attention before you start: the meal is almost certainly understated, and the oven temperature is never given at all.
- The cornmeal quantity looks wrongThe cornmeal quantity looks low -- three tablespoons of meal to three and a half quarts of milk will give a very loose pudding; traditional Indian pudding recipes generally run nearer a third to a half cup of meal per quart of milk. This may be a misprint, or the book may have intended a much thinner pudding; if you want it to set, work from a proven ratio.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the heat is left to the cook's judgement. For a six-hour bake the usual modern equivalent is the slow-oven range, somewhere around 275-300F, lowered if the top colours too fast -- but note that this is a modern gloss, not something the book states.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated (no longer partially hydrogenated). Butter works in the same amount, three tablespoons, and improves the flavour; "a well Criscoed baking dish" simply means well greased.
- MeasuresA half pint of molasses is one cup. Five pints of the milk are added cold during baking, a pint at a time as the recipe directs, and only one quart is scalded at the start — total liquid is three and a half quarts, so use a deep dish of at least four quarts with room to spare.
- The stirring is the pointEach time a crust forms you stir it down and add cold milk. That repeated interruption is generally credited with giving Indian pudding its layered, slightly separated texture. Once the five pints are in, the recipe says simply to let it bake till done, so the stirring stops well before the end and the top is left to set.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter over six hours of concentration.
- The sauceGrated maple sugar stirred into cream and held very cold is essentially an unwhipped sweet cream sauce. Maple sugar is sold in cakes and granulated; maple syrup in cold heavy cream is the practical substitute.
- YieldNot stated. A pudding built on three and a half quarts of milk should serve twelve to sixteen. It reheats well.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from wheat or rye flour, and it is the plainest survivor of the New England habit of adapting British boiled and baked puddings to American grain. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and arrived in quantity through the West Indies trade; the long slow bake is usually explained by the cooling brick oven after the bread came out, which would make six hours seem unremarkable. What makes this particular version a period document is the shortening: A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, launched in 1911, and its recipes substitute the new hydrogenated vegetable fat for the butter, lard or suet a cook would otherwise have reached for in a dish that might have been made with butter, suet or no added fat at all.