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Indian Pudding, Baked
Stir a quart of boiling milk into a pint of Indian cornmeal. Dissolve four ounces of butter by heating it before the fire, mix it first with a pint of molasses, and then, very gradually, with the meal. Flavour with nutmeg and grated lemon-rind or cinnamon, and, as soon as the mixture has cooled, add, stirring briskly, six well-beaten eggs. Butter a dish, and bake at once. Time, two hours to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A New England pudding as recorded by a London kitchen dictionary, and it needs two things the original leaves out: an oven temperature and a warning about the sweetness.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian" here means maize, not the subcontinent. Use a medium or fine yellow cornmeal; coarse polenta grind will stay gritty even after two hours.
- Imperial pints and quartsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so the quart of milk is about 5 US cups and the pint of molasses about 2.5 US cups. A pint of cornmeal by volume is roughly 10-11 oz by weight.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because ranges had none. Two hours for a custard-set pudding means a moderate to slow oven, 325-350F. Hotter and the eggs curdle at the edges before the centre sets.
- That much molassesTwo and a half cups of molasses to five cups of milk is very sweet and very dark by modern taste, and some cooks reduce the sweetener.
- Cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. The scalded meal mixture holds enough heat to scramble six eggs on contact; let it drop to warm, and stir briskly as instructed rather than dumping them in.
- Bake at onceThe instruction is literal. Cornmeal keeps swelling as it stands, and a batter left on the bench turns to stiff mush that bakes dense instead of setting soft.
- Dish and donenessUse a deep buttered dish of at least 3 quarts, since the mixture itself comes to close to that volume; the pudding rises little but bubbles at the rim. It is done when the centre is just set with a slight wobble, and it firms further as it cools.
- ServingFive or six portions, as stated. Traditionally served warm rather than hot, with cold cream poured over.
Indian pudding is one of the oldest surviving dishes of English-speaking North America: an English boiled hasty pudding rebuilt around maize, the grain colonists called Indian corn, and sweetened with the molasses that came north from the Caribbean sugar trade. The baked version, slow-set with eggs and milk in the oven's falling heat, became a New England fixture and is still associated with Boston and with Thanksgiving tables. Its appearance in a London dictionary of cookery shows how far American dishes travelled back across the Atlantic by the late nineteenth century. The spicing here, nutmeg with lemon-rind or cinnamon, is the English hand on it; American versions of the period often use ginger.