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Baked Indian Pudding
A quart sweet milk, an ounce butter, four well-beaten eggs, teacup corn meal, half pound raisins, fourth pound sugar; scald milk and stir in meal while boiling; let stand until blood warm, stir all well together; bake one and a half hours, and serve with sauce. - Mrs. Carrier.
A plain New England-style boiled-and-baked cornmeal custard, written for a cook who already knew what temperature her oven ran at. The measurements need translating and the oven needs a number.
- Indian mealCorn meal -- the title's "Indian" is the older name for maize meal. In the 1870s this meant a stone-ground yellow or white meal somewhat coarser than most supermarket cornmeal. Medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match; fine degerminated meal will set softer.
- The teacupA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern one and this is the genuinely ambiguous measure in the recipe. Period sources vary, some equating it with a gill and some with something nearer a full cup; two-thirds of a cup of meal to a quart of milk is a reasonable starting point, and expect a soft, spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable one.
- Weights to volumeAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons. A quarter pound of sugar is a generous half cup. A half pound of raisins is about a cup and a half.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A custard-style pudding of this kind wants a slow to moderate oven, 325F, for the hour and a half stated; higher and the eggs curdle at the edges before the centre sets.
- Why it must cool to blood warmThis is the hinge of the recipe. "Blood warm" is about body temperature, roughly 98F, and the point of the wait is that four beaten eggs stirred into boiling cornmeal mush will scramble on contact. Do not shortcut it.
- Scalding the mealThe recipe has the meal stirred in while the milk is boiling; rain it in while whisking, then cook a few minutes until it thickens slightly. This gelatinises the starch so the meal does not sink into a gritty layer during the long bake.
- Dish and donenessThe mixture comes close to two quarts, so use a buttered dish of two to three quarts. It is done when the centre is just set with a slight wobble; a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean.
- Yield and sauceServes six to eight. The recipe does not specify; the likely intention is one of the sweet pudding sauces found elsewhere in the book — a hard sauce of butter and sugar, or a thin boiled sauce flavoured with nutmeg or lemon. Plain cream also works.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as opposed to the wheat and oat flours brought from Britain, and the dish is generally traced to New England households adapting hasty pudding — a stirred cornmeal porridge — into something baked and enriched with eggs, sugar and dried fruit. Older versions lean on molasses; this one uses sugar and raisins instead. Its presence in a Midwestern compilation is one small sign of how the New England repertoire travelled west with settlers.