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Baked Indian Pudding (Two quarts of milk two eggs)
Two quarts of milk, two eggs, three-quarters of a cup of corn meal, one tablespoon of flour, one and one-half cups of sugar, onehalf teaspoon of cloves, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one table-spoon of lemon or orange extract, a little grated nutmeg, one-half teaspoon of ginger. Cook one quart of milk and the meal together in a double boiler until it is thick and smooth, then put the mixture in a baking dish and add the other ingredients. Bake in a slow oven till milk does not stick to the knife in trying it.
A New England-style baked cornmeal custard, cooked long and slow. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a set custard looks like, so most of the guesswork is in the oven.
- Slow ovenRead this as somewhere around 275-325F, and expect a long bake, likely a couple of hours or more. The pudding sets by gentle coagulation of egg and milk around swollen cornmeal, so too hot an oven risks curdling the custard and weeping whey.
- Indian meal"Corn meal" here is ordinary yellow or white cornmeal, ideally a medium grind rather than the very fine degerminated sort. Stone-ground meal gives the slightly grainy body the dish is known for.
- Cook the mush first, and cook it properlyThe double-boiler stage is the hinge. If the meal is not fully hydrated and thick before the remaining milk and eggs go in, it settles to the bottom and bakes into a gritty layer. Twenty to thirty minutes of stirring over water is not too long.
- Let the mush cool before the eggsThe original does not say so, but the cooked meal must drop below scalding before the beaten eggs are stirred in, or they will scramble in streaks.
- The second quart of milkIt goes in cold, with the eggs, sugar and spices, and will thin the mush dramatically. That is correct: the loose batter firms during the long bake. Some old versions call for pouring a little cold milk over the top partway through to build the soft top layer.
- Sugar and spiceOne and a half cups of sugar is sweet by modern taste; a cup is closer to current expectations. The tablespoon of lemon or orange extract is also generous by present-day standards — a teaspoon or two is plenty.
- Testing for doneness"Milk does not stick to the knife" means a blade inserted near the center comes out clean, with the very middle still trembling. It continues to set as it cools.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk makes a large pudding — a 3-quart baking dish, serving ten to twelve. Serve warm, with cream or a pour of milk.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinguished from wheat "flour" — the pudding is English in method, a boiled or baked milk pudding, with a New World grain substituted for the oats or wheat of home. It became a Sunday and holiday standby across New England precisely because it suited a slow, dying oven and could be left alone for hours. Molasses is the more famous sweetener, and the sugar-and-spice version here, heavy on cloves, cinnamon, ginger and citrus extract, points to a later household with a well-stocked spice shelf rather than a frontier kitchen. That is typical of community cookbooks of the period, where a dish everyone already knew was still worth setting down in one neighbor's particular proportions.