Home › Village Receipts › Baked Indian Pudding (One quart of milk five)
Baked Indian Pudding (One quart of milk five)
One quart of milk, five tablespoons of corn meal, a little salt, two-thirds cup of molasses, one egg; heat one-half of the milk, and stir in gradually the corn meal; while still hot add the molasses; when a trifle cool add the egg, well beaten, and the salt, and the rest of the milk. Bake two and one-half hours in a slow oven. Serve with a hard sauce.
— Mrs. Chas. E. Nichols
A plain baked cornmeal custard of the New England type, thickened only by five tablespoons of meal in a quart of milk. The long, low bake is the whole point, so resist the urge to speed it.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300F, or even 275F. Anything hotter sets the egg before the meal has softened and you get grainy pudding under a leathery skin.
- Corn mealOld "Indian meal" was stone-ground and fairly coarse. Ordinary yellow cornmeal works; fine degerminated meal absorbs faster and yields a smoother, slightly thinner pudding.
- Scald, then temperHeat the two cups of milk to just below a simmer and rain the meal in while whisking, or it will lump. Cooling before the egg goes in matters -- add a beaten egg to hot mush and it scrambles.
- MolassesTwo-thirds cup is a lot, and it is the only sweetener. Use unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which turns the pudding bitter.
- Dish and depthA quart of milk plus additions needs a 2-quart baking dish. Shallow and wide bakes faster than deep; deep gives a softer, more custardy centre.
- The cold milk trickThe reserved milk -- Some other versions of this pudding pour the reserved milk over the top without stirring it in. This recipe, however, directs that the rest of the milk go in with the beaten egg and salt.
- DonenessAfter two and a half hours it should be set at the edges and still slightly loose at the centre, like a baked custard. It firms as it cools and is better warm than hot.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg or a spoon of brandy, chilled until firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding. No cooking involved.
- YieldSix modest servings.
Baked Indian pudding is one of the oldest continuously made American desserts, a colonial adaptation of English boiled milk puddings to the grain that was actually at hand -- maize, called Indian corn, whose meal was "Indian meal" well into the twentieth century. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and shipped in barrels from the West Indies long before granulated sugar was an everyday household purchase, and the marriage of cornmeal and molasses is what gives the pudding its dark, faintly bitter edge. The very long bake belongs to the era of the wood-fired range: such puddings are often said to have gone into the cooling oven after the bread came out, asking nothing of the cook for the rest of the afternoon. Its appearance in a collection like this one, credited to a named local woman, is typical -- the pudding was by then already old-fashioned, kept alive as much by habit and thrift as by fashion.