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Corn-Meal Pudding
This dish, like pease pudding, is intended to be eaten with hot meat and gravy. It is made by stirring Indian meal into boiling water until it is as thick and smooth as batter. It must be beaten well over a slow fire for a few minutes, and when it bubbles up it is done enough. Time, twenty minutes.
A savoury cornmeal mush, served the way pease pudding is served: as a starch alongside roast or boiled meat. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions are up to the cook.
- Indian mealThis is plain cornmeal, yellow or white; the grind is not specified. Fine-ground cornmeal thickens faster and smoother; a coarse polenta-style grind will need longer cooking than the twenty minutes stated.
- Proportions are not givenNothing in the text tells you how much meal to how much water. A workable starting point for this style of mush is one part cornmeal to four parts water by volume, added gradually until the batter thickness described is reached.
- The hinge: add the meal slowlyCornmeal dropped into boiling water in a mass sets into lumps that will not beat out. Pour it in a thin stream with the water at a rolling boil, whisking constantly, and keep whisking until it is smooth before you lower the heat.
- "A slow fire"Low heat, just enough to keep the pot barely moving. Cornmeal mush scorches on the bottom readily once thick, so stir down to the base of the pan throughout.
- The two timings conflictThe instruction says "a few minutes" but the time note says twenty. Twenty minutes of low simmering is nearer the truth for cornmeal, which tastes raw and gritty if pulled as soon as it bubbles. The bubbling-up is a sign it has thickened, not that the grain is cooked.
- SaltNone is called for, and unsalted cornmeal mush is flat. Salt the water before the meal goes in; you cannot easily correct it later without loosening the texture.
- ServingMeant hot and spoonable, with meat and gravy, not baked or set. Any leftover will firm up solid in the pan when cold and can be sliced and fried, a common way of using up cold mush.
- YieldA cup of cornmeal cooked this way makes roughly four modest side-dish portions.
Cornmeal reached British kitchens as "Indian meal" or "Indian corn" — the qualifier distinguished maize from what an English cook meant by corn, which was wheat — and it arrived mainly through North American trade and through the cheap-food debates of the nineteenth century, when maize was promoted as an economical substitute for wheat flour, notably during and after the Irish famine years. The comparison to pease pudding is the key to it: like pease pudding, this is a bland, filling farinaceous accompaniment whose job is to carry gravy and stretch a joint of meat. The same mixture appears across the Atlantic as mush or hasty pudding, eaten savoury with meat or sweetened with molasses and milk, and sliced cold and fried the next morning.