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Baked Indian Pudding
Three pints milk, three eggs, one tea cup indian meal, sifted, one and one half cups molasses, one half tea cup melted butter, one teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon cinnamon, a pinch of salt; put one quart of the milk over the fire to boil, then stir the meal with the remaining pint of milk and butter; when the milk commences to boil, stir this in, and let it boil five or ten minutes, then take it from the fire, and when a little cool, beat the eggs separately, and stir in. Bake one and one half hours; serve with butter or cream.
A classic New England cornmeal pudding, written for cooks who knew what an unlabelled oven and a teacup measured. The quantities are generous — this is a full baking-dish pudding, not a small one.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian meal" means meal ground from maize, as distinct from English wheat flour. Use a fine or medium yellow cornmeal; stone-ground gives the traditional texture, degerminated supermarket meal gives a smoother one.
- The teacupA nineteenth-century tea cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, often reckoned at about 3/4 cup or 6 fluid ounces. On that reckoning, roughly 3/4 cup cornmeal and about 1/3 cup melted butter. The measure is genuinely approximate and the pudding tolerates it.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the book assumes a cook judging her own oven. A moderate oven, around 325F, suits the hour and a half specified; too hot and the custard can curdle at the edges before the centre sets.
- The hinge: cook the meal firstBoiling the meal in milk for five to ten minutes is the step that makes or breaks the dish. Skipped or shortened, the cornmeal stays gritty and sinks into a sandy layer at the bottom. Stir constantly — it thickens and catches easily.
- Cool before the eggs"When a little cool" means below about 160F. Add beaten eggs to near-boiling mush and they scramble. Tempering a little hot mush into the eggs first is the safest route.
- Beat the eggs separatelyThis means beating each egg on its own into the mixture, or in some period usage beating yolks and whites apart. Either reading works; whipping the whites and folding them in gives a lighter pudding.
- Dish sizeThree pints of milk plus everything else fills a 3-quart baking dish or a large deep casserole. Set it on a sheet pan — molasses boil-over burns onto an oven floor and stays there.
- Doneness and yieldThe pudding is done when the edges are set and the centre still trembles; it firms as it cools. Serves 8 to 10, warm, with cold cream or a spoonful of butter as directed.
Baked Indian pudding is the oven-cooked descendant of hasty pudding, the boiled cornmeal mush that colonial New England households ate at almost any meal. The name preserves the seventeenth-century English habit of calling maize "Indian corn" and its flour "Indian meal" to distinguish it from wheat, which was scarce and expensive in the northern colonies; the pudding is what happens when a cook has plenty of corn, plenty of milk, and molasses arriving cheaply through the West Indies trade. Ginger and cinnamon appear in period versions, though the spicing varied and nutmeg and allspice are equally common, and the long slow bake is not fussiness but the natural rhythm of a wood-fired oven cooling after the bread came out.