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Indian Pudding
5 cups scalded milk 1/3 cup Indian meal 1/2 cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ginger Pour milk slowly on meal, cook in double boiler twenty minutes, add molasses, salt, and ginger; pour into buttered pudding-dish and bake two hours in slow oven; serve with cream. If baked too rapidly it will not whey. Ginger may be omitted.
A plain baked cornmeal pudding of the New England type, thin enough to set into a soft custard rather than a cake. The long slow bake is the whole point.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal. Fine or medium yellow stone-ground meal gives the closest texture; degerminated supermarket cornmeal works but tastes flatter. Do not substitute corn flour or masa.
- Slow ovenIn this period that generally means somewhere around 250-325F; 300F is a reasonable modern reading, though the book gives no figure. The point of two hours at a low heat is to let the meal swell slowly, which is also what allows the pudding to separate rather than set into a solid mass.
- "It will not whey"The whey is the pale liquid that gathers at the bottom and edges as the pudding bakes; the recipe treats its appearance as a sign the pudding has been baked slowly enough. High heat sets the custard too fast and you get a uniform, denser block instead.
- The double-boiler stageTwenty minutes over simmering water thickens the meal to about the consistency of thin porridge. Stir now and then. Skipping this step leaves gritty meal that settles into a raw layer at the bottom of the dish.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is harsh enough to dominate the whole pudding. Half a cup is the only sweetening here, so the grade matters.
- Dish and depthA 2-quart buttered baking dish is right for this quantity. The batter is very loose going into the oven; that is expected. Set the dish on a sheet pan in case it bubbles over.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Serve warm, spooned rather than sliced, with cream poured over as the recipe directs; heavy cream suits it better than whipped.
"Indian meal" was the English colonists' name for maize meal, distinguishing it from the wheat and rye "flour" they knew, and Indian pudding belongs to the family of English hasty-pudding and boiled-pudding dishes adapted to the grain that grew in New England. Molasses did the sweetening because it arrived cheaply by ship from the West Indies at a time when refined sugar was a costlier household item, and the ginger fits the older English habit of spicing sweet puddings warmly. The instructions are brief in the manner of the period, which suggests the dish was familiar enough to need little explanation. A slow oven and a long bake are also consistent with the older practice of setting such a pudding in a brick oven as it cooled after baking day, though the recipe itself says nothing of this.