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Indian Meal Pudding
Eight tablespoons of yellow Indian meal; boil two quarts of milk and stir in the meal. Beat two eggs and add a pint of cold milk, two teaspoons of salt, one cup of molasses, one teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Pour in deep dish and bake four hours. Serve with hard sauce.
— Miss Helen Pendexter
A classic New England Indian pudding, thickened with cornmeal and sweetened with molasses. The recipe gives no oven temperature, which matters more here than anything else.
- Indian mealYellow cornmeal, and in this period a coarser stone-ground grind than most supermarket meal. Stone-ground yellow cornmeal gives the right slightly gritty texture; degerminated fine meal will set softer.
- The ovenNo temperature is given, as was usual in books written for a wood range. Four hours implies a slow oven, 300F or lower; at 275F to 300F the pudding sets gradually and the top browns without the edges scorching.
- Vessel sizeTwo quarts of milk plus a pint more comes to two and a half quarts of liquid before the meal and molasses. Use a buttered 3- to 4-quart deep baking dish, and stand it on a sheet pan in case it bubbles over.
- Stirring in the mealScattering eight tablespoons of dry meal into boiling milk invites lumps. Rain it in slowly while whisking, or slake it first in a little of the cold milk. Let the mixture cool somewhat before the beaten eggs go in so they do not scramble.
- The saltTwo teaspoons in a sweet pudding reads high to modern palates, though molasses puddings do take more salt than you expect. A teaspoon is closer to current practice if you want the sweetness forward.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar, often with a little vanilla or brandy, served cold in a spoonful on the hot pudding. Cream it ahead and chill it firm.
- YieldEight to ten servings. It is better warm than hot, and reheats well the next day.
"Indian meal" was the colonial name for maize meal, distinguishing it from "meal" or flour made from English wheat, and the phrase survived in American cookbooks long after anyone needed the distinction. Baked Indian pudding descends from the boiled cornmeal mush that colonists learned to make from Native cooking and then sweetened with the molasses that arrived in New England by the barrel through the West Indies trade; the long slow bake is generally traced to the habit of setting the dish in a brick oven or a banked range after the day's bread came out, letting it cook in falling heat. That it appears here with a contributor's name attached is typical of a community cookbook of the period, and a pudding of cornmeal, milk and molasses was cheap, filling and expected on the table.