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Old-Time Indian Pudding
Mix well together 1/2 pint of fine corn-meal, a scant ½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of flour and 1 cupful of molasses. When smooth gradually add 3 pints of hot milk, stand over the fire and stir steadily until thickened without lumps. Set aside until cold then stir in 1 teaspoonful of ginger, 2 teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, and 1 quart of cold milk. Turn into a baking dish and bake very slowly for four hours; when half done pour 1 cupful of cold milk over the top.
Do not stir in.
A full-size baked cornmeal pudding of the old New England type, scaled for a large household. Nothing here is difficult, but two details decide whether it comes out creamy or grainy: cooking the meal thoroughly on the stovetop first, and keeping the oven genuinely low.
- The hinge: cook the mush properlyThe stovetop stage is what hydrates the cornmeal. Stir over medium heat until it is as thick as porridge and no longer tastes raw and chalky, 8 to 10 minutes, before setting it aside to cool. Undercook it here and four hours in the oven will not save the texture.
- Very slowly means 275-300FVery slowly means a low oven -- period oven tables put a "very slow" oven somewhere around 250F to 300F, though the recipe itself says only "bake very slowly." Higher and the milk and molasses will curdle and scorch at the edges before the centre sets. Four hours at that temperature is plausible, not an exaggeration.
- Measure the meal by volume, not weight1½ pint of corn-meal is 3 cups, measured dry. Use plain yellow or white cornmeal, medium or fine grind; do not substitute self-rising cornmeal mix or coarse polenta.
- Total liquid3 pints hot milk (6 cups) into the meal, then 1 quart cold milk (4 cups) stirred in after cooling, then 1 cup poured over the top in the oven. Eleven cups of milk in all. The batter will look alarmingly thin before baking; that is intended.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap, the bitter, mineral-heavy final boiling, is far too harsh for a full cup of it in a milk pudding.
- The cup poured on topAdding cold milk at the halfway point without stirring is deliberate. It sinks slowly and gives the pudding the soft, whey-like layer under a set skin that people remember from these old puddings. Skip it and you get a uniform, denser cake.
- Dish and yieldThe mixture comes to nearly four quarts, so use a deep 4- to 5-quart baking dish with headroom, set in the middle of the oven. It serves 10 to 12, warm, with cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
- DonenessJudge by the surface: browned, slightly domed, and just trembling at the centre. It thickens further as it cools, and it reheats well the next day.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinguished from the wheat "flour" they knew at home. It is the baked, molasses-sweetened descendant of hasty pudding, the boiled cornmeal mush that stood in for English wheat porridge in New England, and it appears in American cookbooks from the earliest ones onward. Its place in a book of low-cost recipes is easy to read: cornmeal and molasses were the two cheapest sweet and starchy staples in the American pantry, molasses arriving in quantity through the New England trade in West Indian sugar, and milk stretched them into a dessert for a dozen people. The four-hour bake is often explained as a relic of the residual heat left in a brick oven or a coal range after the day's cooking, when long slow baking cost nothing extra.