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Corn Puddings, American
Put into a saucepan one pint of milk, the thin rind of half a lemon, and a table-spoonful of sugar; let it boil, and stir into it by degrees four table-spoonfuls of Indian flour. Keep on stirring it for ten minutes or more, then turn it out and let it cool. When quite cold, add three well-beaten eggs, put the batter into buttered cups, allow room for rising, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 8d.
A simple stovetop-then-oven cornmeal custard, closer to Italian polenta dolce than to what Americans now call corn pudding. The recipe is sound as written; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- Indian flourThis is cornmeal — "Indian" meaning maize rather than the wheat of English baking. Use fine or medium yellow cornmeal; coarse polenta grind will not soften in ten minutes of stirring. Four tablespoons to a pint of milk gives a loose porridge, not a stiff mush.
- A good ovenThe book gives no temperature, and "good oven" in Cassell's is relative rather than fixed; a moderate oven (in the region of 350-375F) suits the purpose, which is enough heat to set the egg and lift the batter without the outside drying before the centre cooks.
- The pintCassell's is a British book, so the pint is 20 fl oz (about 2 1/2 US cups). Using a 16 oz US pint makes a noticeably thicker pudding — still workable, but stir attentively.
- Cool it completelyThe instruction to let the cornmeal base go "quite cold" before the eggs go in is the hinge. Warm porridge will scramble the eggs into threads and the puddings will bake grainy rather than smooth.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means peel pared without the white pith. The recipe does not say what becomes of it, but strips of peel are normally infused and lifted out rather than grated in, and removing them before the eggs go in is the sensible reading.
- Buttered cupsSmall cups, ramekins or dariole moulds, filled about two-thirds to give the "room for rising" the recipe asks for. No water bath is called for and none is needed; these are meant to rise a little and take some colour.
By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s, "Indian meal" had long been British shorthand for American maize, and English cookery books tended to file almost any maize dish under "American" regardless of how it was actually eaten in the United States. What is described here is really an English baked batter pudding with cornmeal standing in for flour or semolina, lemon-scented in the manner of a Victorian nursery pudding; American corn puddings of the same period are often said to have been made from fresh scraped sweetcorn. The "probable cost, 8d." is characteristic of the book — a costed pudding that fed five was information readers wanted as much as the method.