Home › Pies and Pastry › Boiled Indian-Meal Pudding
Boiled Indian-Meal Pudding
Put together in a mixing-bowl 1 cupful each of beef suet (chopped fine), molasses, milk, seeded raisins, and sift into the mixture 1 cupful flour, 2 cupfuls corn meal, and a level teaspoonful of soda sifted in with the flour and meal. Mix batter thoroughly. Dip a cloth bag in hot water, dust the inside with flour, and pour the batter into the bag, allowing room for the pudding to swell. Plunge pudding into a deep kettleful of boiling water; cover for three hours, refilling with boiling water as the water boils away from the pudding. When done, remove and plunge into cold water; take out immediately and drain. Cut open bag and place pudding on hot dish, and serve with raisin sauce.
A boiled suet pudding of the old New England type, thickened mostly with cornmeal. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth and the water level decide whether it succeeds.
- Keep it at a full boil, always coveredThe water must never stop boiling and must never drop below the top of the pudding, or the batter chills and sets heavy in the middle. Top up only with water already boiling in a second pan. The bag: a pudding cloth is a square of unbleached muslin or heavy cotton, dipped in hot water as the recipe directs, wrung out, floured on the inside, then filled and tied, leaving room -- the recipe's own instruction -- for the pudding to swell, since cornmeal and soda together swell a good deal.
- Or use a pudding basinA buttered pudding basin of at least 2 quarts, covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied down and set on a rack in a covered pot of simmering water, is easier to manage, though as it steams rather than boils it may want somewhat longer than the three hours given.
- Indian meal"Indian meal" and "corn meal" both mean meal ground from maize, white or yellow. Do not substitute cornstarch or the fine degerminated meal sold for cornbread mixes, which absorbs less liquid.
- Beef suetRaw kidney fat from a butcher, chopped or grated fine while cold; shredded packaged suet works directly. Frozen and grated butter is one modern stand-in, though the pudding will be softer and less springy.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses, so use a full-flavoured unsulphured molasses rather than a light syrup. Get the pudding into the water promptly once mixed.
- Doneness and the cold plungeAfter three hours a skewer into the centre should come out clean and hot. The brief dip in cold water shrinks the cloth away from the crust so the bag peels off cleanly; leave it in longer and the surface goes sodden.
- Yield and sauceEnough for roughly eight to ten servings, cut in wedges and served hot. The recipe gives no yield. Raisin sauces of this period are generally raisins simmered in water with sugar, thickened with a little flour or cornstarch and finished with butter and lemon or a spoonful of spirits.