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Indian Meal Pudding
A half pint of Indian meal mixed with a quart of boiling milk will make a good pudding, with the addition of an egg, two ounces of butter melted, and stirred in, some pounded sugar, a little salt, nutmeg, and ginger. Bake in a well-buttered dish. The yellow cornmeal is the richest. For a boiled suet pudding mix flour with the suet when chopped, or it will not separate equally but become massed together. Moisten with milk, and knead and beat the dough, which should be firm, with the rolling-pin to make it light. Make into dumplings of the size of a large apple, and boil them separately tied up in cloths loosely to give room for swelling. To bake pudding, two hours; boil, one hour and a half.
Two puddings are packed into one paragraph here: a baked cornmeal custard and a boiled suet dumpling. The final line gives the times for both, in that order.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, and the entry is right that yellow is the richer choice. Use a medium or fine grind; modern coarse polenta grind will stay gritty in the times given.
- The measuresA half pint of meal to a quart of milk is a loose 1:4 ratio by volume. In imperial measure that is about 10 fl oz of meal to 40 fl oz of milk (roughly 1.25 cups to 5 cups); read as US measure it is 1 cup to 4 cups. Either way the proportion should give a soft spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable one.
- Pour the milk boilingThis is the hinge of the baked pudding. The boiling milk must be poured onto the meal and stirred at once so the starch swells before baking; meal stirred into cool milk sinks and bakes into a sandy layer at the bottom.
- Temper the eggAdd the egg only after the meal-and-milk mixture has stopped steaming hard, or it will scramble in threads. Beat it with a spoonful of the warm mixture first, then stir back in.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual for the period. A moderate 325-350F for the stated two hours is a reasonable modern equivalent; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and still trembling.
- Sugar and spicePounded sugar is loaf sugar broken up and pounded fine, closest to today's caster or fine granulated. Quantities are left to the cook; about a third of a cup, with a quarter teaspoon each of nutmeg and ginger and a half teaspoon of salt, would suit the volume above.
- Suet for the second puddingAsk a butcher for beef suet; packaged shredded suet works and is already floured, which is exactly what the instruction about mixing flour with the chopped suet is for. Vegetable shortening will not give the same open crumb.
- Boiling in clothsTie each dumpling loosely in a floured cloth, leaving room to swell, and keep the water at a bare rolling boil for the full hour and a half, topping up with boiling water so the pot never goes off the boil.
- YieldThe baked pudding will roughly fill a 1.5-quart dish. The suet dough, made into dumplings the size of a large apple as directed, should give something like four to six, depending on how much flour it takes up.
"Indian meal" was the standard English name for maize meal from the colonial period well into the twentieth century, distinguishing New World grain from the wheat, oats and barley that were simply called meal or flour. Baked cornmeal-and-milk puddings of this kind are the same family as New England Indian pudding, usually sweetened with molasses there. The remark that suet must be cut into flour or it will mass together is sound, and is generally given as the reason commercial suet is sold pre-dredged.