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Peach Suet Pudding or Pone
Wash, then dry a pint of dried peaches and dredge with flour. Heat a quart of milk and mix with a pint of Orleans molasses, then let cool. Add to this one-fourth pound chopped suet and four eggs beaten light, a teaspoon each of ginger and cinnamon, and a pinch of nutmeg. Add yellow Indian meal to make a thick batter and into this stir the peaches. Place in pudding cloth dipped in hot water then dredged with flour, leaving room to swell. Boil hard for five hours. (See Apple Pone.) Serve with hard sauce. This, like plum pudding, may be made the day before using.
A boiled cornmeal pudding of the old school: enormous, dense, and sweetened entirely with molasses. Nothing here is unsafe, but the vessel and a few ingredient names need translating.
- Indian mealThis is plain yellow cornmeal, not a mix and not masa. Medium or coarse grind gives the right grainy texture; fine grind will set closer to a cake.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans cane molasses — the ordinary unsulphured kind sold today. Do not substitute blackstrap, which is far more bitter and will dominate a pint of it.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, at a quarter pound (about 115 g). Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Freeze it and grate it rather than trying to chop it soft.
- The pudding clothA square of unbleached cotton or a doubled tea towel, scalded, wrung out, and floured on the inside so the flour forms a skin that keeps water out. Tie it loosely — cornmeal swells hard, and a tight tie splits the cloth. A greased basin of at least four quarts, with pleated foil and a lid, is the modern equivalent; note that the batter as written is a very large quantity.
- "Boil hard for five hours"The pudding must stay submerged in water at a full boil the entire time; sit it on a trivet or an inverted plate so it does not scorch on the pot floor. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water only — cold water halts the cooking and can make the cornmeal seize gluey.
- Dredging the peachesThe flour coating keeps the dried fruit suspended instead of sinking to what will become the bottom. Modern dried peaches are softer and wetter than older home-dried halves; chop them to raisin size and they will hydrate perfectly well in five hours of steam.
- Batter consistencyAdd the cornmeal gradually. You want a batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours — too loose and it never sets, too stiff and the centre stays raw.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with brandy, rum, or vanilla, chilled firm and sliced onto the hot pudding.
- Yield and keepingA quart of milk, a pint of molasses and a pint of fruit make a pudding serving twelve or more. The recipe notes it may be made the day before using; reheat by steaming for an hour, not in the microwave, which dries the edges.
Pone comes into English from an Algonquian word — recorded by early Virginia colonists in forms such as appone — meaning something baked, and it attached itself in American usage to breads and puddings made of cornmeal. This one belongs to the boiled-pudding family that the colonies inherited from England: suet, spice, dried fruit, and a floured cloth dropped into a pot for half a day, the same method behind plum pudding, which the author invokes directly. What makes it American is the substitution of Indian meal for wheat flour and molasses for sugar, both cheaper and both abundant in the coastal trade. Dried peaches were a staple of Southern and Appalachian pantries, sliced and sun-dried on boards or roofs in late summer, and a book organised by fruit would naturally reach for them in a winter pudding when nothing fresh was to be had.