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Oatmeal Hasty Pudding
Mix a table-spoonful of flour, a table-spoonful of oatmeal, and a pinch of salt smoothly with four table-spoonfuls of cold milk. Stir these gradually into a pint of boiling milk, and beat the mixture with a fork until it is quite smooth and free from lumps. Let it boil quickly for four or five minutes, pour it on small plates, and serve hot. Send cream and sugar, or treacle, to table in a tureen. When the Scotch or coarse oatmeal is used, it should be soaked all night in a little cold water, then added gradually to the boiling milk, and beaten as above. If preferred the flour may be omitted altogether, and oatmeal only may be used. Time to boil the pudding, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for two persons.
A thin milk porridge set on plates rather than served in bowls. The recipe contradicts itself on timing, which is the first thing to settle.
- The timing conflictThe body of the recipe says boil four or five minutes; the summary line says twenty. The two figures cannot both be right, and the recipe does not say which applies to which version. The longer time may have been meant for the coarse-oatmeal version, but that is a guess, not something the text states.
- What oatmeal is meant"Oatmeal" here is dry-milled meal, fine or medium grind, not rolled flakes. Fine oatmeal disperses into the milk as described; modern rolled oats will not, and will give you flecks of soft flake in thin milk instead of a smooth pudding. Fine or medium oatmeal is still sold, often labelled porridge oatmeal.
- Scotch or coarse oatmealThis is pinhead or steel-cut meal. The overnight soak in cold water is not optional with it -- it softens the cut grain so it will swell in the five to twenty minutes of cooking rather than staying gritty.
- Slaking the mealThe hinge of the whole thing: the flour and meal must be mixed smooth with the four tablespoons of cold milk before any of it touches the pan. Added dry to boiling milk it seizes into lumps that no amount of beating will disperse.
- Boil quickly, but watch the baseA pint of milk thickened by starch scorches readily. Keep it moving with the fork the whole time and use a heavy pan; a milk pan or double boiler is safer if you are cooking the coarse version for twenty minutes.
- TreacleBlack treacle, or golden syrup if you want it sweeter and milder. American readers can use molasses, though full-strength blackstrap is more bitter than what was meant.
- Measures and yieldA pint is 20 fl oz Imperial, roughly 2 1/2 US cups. Sufficient for two, as stated, as a breakfast or supper dish. "Probable cost, 4d" is fourpence in pre-decimal currency, quoted to show how cheap the dish was rather than as any guide now.
- ServingPoured onto small plates it thickens as it cools to a soft, spoonable layer. The cream, sugar or treacle goes to the table separately, in a tureen as the recipe directs, so each eater helps themselves.
Hasty pudding took its name from speed: a grain-and-liquid pudding needing no eggs, no suet, no bag and no oven, ready in the time it takes to boil milk. In southern England it was commonly made with wheat flour, in the north and in Scotland with oatmeal, and in America with cornmeal; the "as thick as hasty pudding" line in "Yankee Doodle" is a simile for thickness and does not itself specify the grain. The dish is essentially an exercise in slaking starch with cold liquid before adding it to hot, the technique underlying sauces, gruels and thickened soups. Its cost of fourpence for two portions marks it as a dish of household economy.