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MEAL PUDDING (American)
A breakfast-cupful of Indian cornmeal and a tea-spoonful of salt, mixed with boiling milk, makes a pudding much liked by the Americans; and, when enriched with eggs, of which there should be four to this quantity of meal, it cannot fail to please almost any palate. The eggs must not be added until the mixture has cooled. Boil in a buttered mould, and serve with syrup and butter, or with any sweet sauce. Time, two hours and a half in a mould. A quart of milk is sufficient for the above ingredients.
A boiled cornmeal pudding of the plainest sort, closer to a steamed batter pudding than to the baked Indian pudding most Americans know. Two things decide whether it works: cooling the mush before the eggs go in, and keeping the water at a bare simmer for the full time.
- Eggs into cooled mushThe instruction is not decorative. Cornmeal scalded with boiling milk sits well above 160F, and eggs beaten into it at that point curdle into visible threads. Let the mixture drop to hand-warm, then beat the eggs in thoroughly.
- Indian cornmealPlain yellow or white cornmeal, not the degerminated fine grind sold for cornbread mixes and not self-rising. A medium stone-ground meal gives the texture the recipe assumes.
- A breakfast-cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces of volume, so call it 1 to 1¼ cups of meal. The proportion that matters is meal to milk, and the recipe gives that: one breakfast-cup to a quart.
- A quart of milkAn imperial quart, 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups. Whole milk. The recipe calls for it boiling; pour it over the meal and salt while stirring to prevent lumps.
- Boiling in a mouldButter a pudding basin or metal mould generously, fill it no more than three-quarters full since the batter swells, and cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil tied under the rim. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pot with water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep the water at a steady simmer, topping up with boiling water as it drops.
- Two and a half hoursThe time the recipe gives, and it is not worth cutting short; the meal needs the time to swell and lose its raw taste. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and let the pudding stand five minutes before turning out.
- Syrup and butterIn an American context this means molasses or maple syrup with a lump of butter melting into it. A hard sauce or a thin custard also suits it.
- YieldAbout six servings, depending on how it is cut. Leftovers slice cold and fry well in butter.
"Indian meal" was a standing English and colonial term for maize meal, distinguishing it from wheat, rye or oat meal, and it persisted in British cookbooks after American usage had largely shortened it. Boiled and steamed puddings in a cloth or mould were an ordinary British method for a sweet course, so what is presented here is an American grain treated by an English technique, which may be why it carries the separate label "American." The better-known Indian pudding of New England is a slow-baked, molasses-sweetened relative of the same mush, and both are close kin to the plain cornmeal hasty pudding of colonial kitchens. Cornmeal reached late-Victorian Britain largely as an import, which may lie behind the reassuring note that with four eggs added it "cannot fail to please almost any palate."