Home › Hot Desserts › Indian Pudding
Indian Pudding
Scald one quart of milk, when boiling hot stir in three tablespoons of corn meal, the same of flour; wet up with cold milk and one tablespoon of butter. Let cool and add a well-beaten egg, one-half cup of sugar, one-quarter cup of molasses, one-half teaspoon of ginger, one-half teaspoon of cinnamon. Add one-quarter pint of cold milk and bake three hours. Eat with hard sauce.
A classic New England baked cornmeal pudding, written in the compressed style of its era: no oven temperature, no dish size, and one ambiguous instruction that decides the texture. A few clarifications make it reliable.
- "Wet up with cold milk"This means slurry the cornmeal and flour in a little cold milk before they go into the scalded milk, so they do not lump. Whisk the dry meal and flour with about half a cup of cold milk, then pour that into the hot milk while stirring.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A slow oven, around 300F, suits a three-hour bake; much hotter risks curdling and a cracked surface.
- The last quarter pint of milkA quarter pint is half a cup. The recipe simply says to add it. In some versions of Indian pudding this final milk is poured over the top without stirring, or added partway through baking, so that it sinks and separates into a soft, whey-like top; whether that is intended here is not stated.
- Corn meal"Indian meal" and corn meal here mean stone-ground meal, coarser than the fine degerminated meal on most supermarket shelves; colour was not fixed. Coarser meal gives more body; fine meal will still work but sets softer.
- Three hours is not a mistakeThe long, low bake is what gelatinizes the meal fully and takes the raw grain edge off. Pulling it at ninety minutes leaves a gritty, thin pudding. It is done when the centre barely trembles and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean.
- Dish and depthUse a buttered 2-quart baking dish or larger, deep rather than wide; the liquid alone comes to about five cups. A shallow dish evaporates too much over three hours. A water bath is not called for but will guard against the edges setting hard.
- MolassesUnsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring roften vanilla, brandy or rosewater, served cold in a lump so it melts over the hot pudding. It is not cooked.
- YieldSix servings, and it is better slightly warm than piping hot. It reheats well the next day.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, the colonial English term for maize meal as opposed to the wheat, rye and oat "corn" they had known at home. It is essentially a hasty pudding the boiled grain porridge of English cookery transposed onto the one grain New England had in abundance, then enriched with milk, eggs and the molasses that arrived in quantity through the West Indies trade. It kept appearing in general cookbooks under hot desserts: it was cheap, it used pantry staples, and it could sit in a cooling oven for three hours without attention. The ginger and cinnamon are the usual pairing, though some nineteenth-century versions are said to use nutmeg alone.