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Baked Indian Pudding
Take nearly one pint sifted meal and make into a mush. Pour over it one quart of boiled sweet milk. Add one gill of molasses, one gill of sugar, six eggs beaten separately, half a pint chopped suet. If you like, add a few currants, raisins, or a little citron. Bake nearly two hours. Eat with sauce.--Mrs.
A cornmeal custard pudding of the old school, rich with suet and six eggs. The recipe assumes you know how to make a mush and how hot a pudding oven should be, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Meal" here means yellow or white cornmeal, not oatmeal or flour. Fine or medium grind both work; coarse grits will stay gritty even after two hours.
- A gillHalf a cup. So half a cup of molasses and half a cup of sugar, which with a quart of milk gives a pudding that is sweet but not cloying.
- Make into a mushStir the pint of cornmeal into just enough boiling water to make a thick porridge and cook it a few minutes until it stops tasting raw. Pouring the hot milk over an uncooked slurry gives a thin, sandy pudding.
- Temper before the eggs go inLet the meal-and-milk mixture cool to warm before adding the beaten eggs, or you will get scrambled egg through the custard. This is the hinge of the whole dish.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks and whites beaten apart, the whites folded in last. It lightens what would otherwise be a dense pudding.
- SuetHalf a pint of finely chopped beef suet, roughly 4 oz. Ask a butcher, or substitute an equal volume of cold butter cut small; the texture is softer but the flavour is closer to modern taste.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat; a workable modern equivalent is about 325-350F. Two hours at that heat in a buttered deep dish of at least 3 quarts, covered loosely if the top browns early; it is done when a knife comes out clean and the centre barely trembles.
- Yield and sauceServes eight generously. "Sauce" means a sweet pudding sauce: hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and brandy or nutmeg), or a thin warm custard. Serve the pudding hot.
Indian pudding is a New England dish by origin, its name a reminder that colonists called maize meal "Indian meal" to distinguish it from wheat flour. Its ancestor is the boiled cornmeal mush known as hasty pudding, enriched over time with milk, molasses, eggs and suet until it could be baked as a dessert rather than eaten as a porridge. That it turns up in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first issued in 1878, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree), a compilation of contributions from Southern housewives, shows how far the dish had travelled from Massachusetts by the late nineteenth century. The recipe's shape -- suet, dried fruit, a sweet sauce -- is also that of the English boiled puddings the colonists brought with them, with cornmeal standing in for the flour or breadcrumbs of the old country.