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Indian Apple Pudding
Pare and core a dozen apples. Have ready a quart of milk heated and add a quart of Indian meal, mixing and cooking carefully a few minutes. Add salt to taste, a cup each of molasses and suet (chopped). Pour over the apples; place in baking-dish and bake two hours or boil (in pudding cloth) for three.
A New England Indian pudding built around a dozen whole apples, cooked either in the oven or in a cloth. The proportions as printed are unusually dry, and that is the first thing to reckon with.
- Indian meal is cornmealNineteenth-century "Indian meal" is stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, generally coarser than today's supermarket grind. A medium grind gives the closest texture; fine degerminated meal sets up pasty.
- The meal-to-milk ratioA quart of meal to a quart of milk produces a stiff mush you can stand a spoon in, not a batter. Many Indian pudding recipes call for considerably more liquid in proportion to meal, so if you want a spoonable pudding you will need more milk — the original as written is best read as a heavy, sliceable pudding.
- Cook the meal properly"Mixing and cooking carefully a few minutes" is the hinge. Rain the meal into the hot milk while whisking or it will lump, and let it actually thicken over low heat; raw cornmeal stays gritty no matter how long the pudding bakes.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped fine or grated after chilling. Butchers will order it; frozen suet grates most easily. A cup is roughly 4 oz. Butter can stand in, though it changes the texture from short and crumbly to softer.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity. A cup is 12 oz by weight and carries most of the sweetening in the dish.
- The applesPared and cored whole, they sit in the dish and the batter is poured over them. Use a firm baking apple that holds its shape over two hours — Northern Spy, Baldwin, Granny Smith. Softer eating apples collapse into the meal.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, roughly 300–325°F, suits a two-hour pudding of this kind. Cover for the first hour so the top does not set into a crust before the middle cooks. Bake in a deep buttered dish set in the oven's lower third.
- The boiled versionA pudding cloth means a floured, scalded square of close-woven cotton, tied loosely to allow swelling, and three hours at a steady simmer in water that never stops moving. Top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry, and unwrap the pudding as soon as it comes out or it steams itself soggy.
- YieldA dozen apples plus the meal, milk, molasses and suet makes a very large pudding — twelve or more servings. Halve it for an ordinary household. Serve warm with cream or a hard sauce.
Indian pudding is one of the oldest continuously made dishes in the American Northeast: cornmeal, milk and molasses, slow-cooked until the meal swells and the molasses darkens. The name comes from the meal, "Indian corn" being the colonial term that distinguished maize from the wheat and rye settlers knew as "corn" in England. Molasses did the sweetening because it came cheap through the West Indies trade while refined sugar did not, and suet supplied the richness where beef fat was to hand. Adding apples is a natural extension — orchard fruit was abundant, stored well through winter, and turned a plain porridge-pudding into something closer to a fruit dessert. The alternative of baking or boiling in a cloth belongs to a period when hearth cooking was still common and a pot of water may have been more reliable than a brick oven.