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Minute Pudding
Take sweet milk, or half water and milk, a pinch of salt, let boil, stir in wheat flour, as in making corn-meal mush, until same thickness as mush; remove from fire, and serve at once with sweetened cream flavored with nutmeg. Some think it improved by adding blackberries, raspberries or cherries, either canned or fresh, just before taking from stove. - Yankee Girl.
A stovetop flour porridge of the plainest kind, given without a single measurement. The one thing that decides whether it is good or pasty is how the flour goes into the milk and how long it cooks afterward.
- No quantities are givenThe original assumes you know mush by eye. A workable starting point is 2 cups milk to about 1/2 cup flour, but the recipe genuinely leaves this to judgment, so add the flour gradually and stop when it mounds on the spoon.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, as opposed to the sour or buttermilk that a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. The half-water version was presumably an economy measure, and it makes a lighter, less rich pudding.
- Adding the flourDry flour shaken into boiling milk will seize into lumps far faster than cornmeal does. Either whisk the flour into a little cold milk first and stir that in, or sift it in very slowly with constant beating.
- Cook it past thickThe name most likely advertises how quickly the pudding can be made rather than a literal cooking time. Flour thickens almost immediately but tastes raw and pasty, so although the original says to remove it as soon as it reaches mush thickness, it is worth keeping it over low heat, stirring, for a good five to eight minutes after it comes together.
- ScorchingMilk starches catch quickly. Use a heavy saucepan over moderate heat and keep the spoon moving across the bottom, or set the pan in a larger pan of simmering water.
- Sweetened creamThe sauce is simply cream stirred with sugar and grated nutmeg, poured over unwhipped. Pre-ground nutmeg is much weaker than freshly grated; grate it if you can.
- The fruitStirred in at the very end so it warms without breaking down. Canned fruit of the period was usually put up in syrup, whether at home or commercially, so drain it or the pudding will thin.
- Yield and servingOn the quantities suggested above, two cups of milk makes three or four small servings. It must go to the table at once, as it stiffens noticeably as it cools.
Minute pudding belongs to the large family of boiled flour and meal porridges that fed American households before baking powder and the cookstove made quick cakes easy. It is essentially hasty pudding with wheat flour standing in for cornmeal, cornmeal being cheaper and wheat considered the finer of the two. Both names advertise speed: this was the pudding you made when there was nothing prepared and dinner was already on the table. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and published in the later 1870s, gathered contributions from readers and credits them variously by initials, place, or pen names such as the "Yankee Girl" credited here, and the New England signature fits the dish, since hasty pudding was long a staple of that region. The suggestion of berries or cherries, fresh or canned, reflects a household that put up fruit in summer and had jars to draw on all winter.