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Polenta Pudding, Sweet
Boil the milk and the polenta as in the last recipe. When the mixture is quite smooth and thick, mix with it three table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, four ounces of stoned raisins, an ounce of candied peel, finely shredded, half a nutmeg, grated, and an ounce of butter. When the ingredients are well mixed, pour the preparation into a buttered mould, and bake in a good oven. Turn the pudding out before serving. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A baked cornmeal milk pudding, sweetened and studded with dried fruit. The main difficulty is that the base is deferred to "the last recipe", so the milk-to-polenta ratio has to be supplied.
- The missing baseCassell's preceding polenta recipe cooks the meal in milk until thick and smooth. A workable proportion is about 1 cup (5 oz) coarse polenta to 4-5 cups milk, simmered and stirred until it pulls away from the pan, roughly 25-35 minutes for traditional meal. Instant polenta will reach the same point in 5 minutes but sets denser.
- Cook the grain fully before it goes in the mouldThis is the hinge. Baking will not soften undercooked cornmeal in a fruit-and-butter mixture; if the polenta is at all gritty when you take it off the heat, the finished pudding will be gritty. Taste it before adding the sugar.
- Moist sugarUnrefined sugar still carrying molasses, closest today to light brown sugar. Three tablespoons is modest for six or seven servings; the raisins and peel do much of the sweetening.
- "A good oven"In Victorian usage a well-heated oven with no temperature specified; something in the moderate range, around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. At 90 minutes the aim is a set, lightly browned surface rather than further cooking of the grain.
- Half a nutmegAbout a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg, which is assertive by modern taste. Half that amount is enough unless you want the pudding frankly spiced.
- Stoned raisins and candied peel"Stoned" simply means the seeds removed, a step done for you now. Candied peel means citron, orange or lemon peel in sugar syrup, sold in blocks; shred it fine so it disperses rather than sinking.
- Turning it outButter the mould thoroughly and let the pudding stand 10-15 minutes after baking so the starch firms; it should release more cleanly then, and is likelier to break up if turned out straight from the oven.
- Yield and costSix or seven servings, as stated. The shilling is a period price note, not a measurement, and appears throughout Cassell's as a guide for household budgeting.
Polenta reached English cookbooks as a foreign curiosity long after maize had become the staple porridge of northern Italy, where cornmeal displaced buckwheat and chestnut flour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cassell's, compiled in late-Victorian London for households that expected a pudding at the end of dinner, treats it not as a savoury but as raw material for the familiar family of baked cereal puddings alongside rice, sago, semolina and tapioca: boil a starch in milk, enrich it with butter and sugar, add dried fruit and nutmeg, bake in a mould, turn out. The American Indian pudding, made from the identical grain, offers a parallel rather than a derivation - cornmeal was cheap, filling, and behaved predictably in milk.