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Apple Indian
1/4 cup Indian meal 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt cinnamon and nutmeg Scald milk; pour on to Indian meal; add remaining ingredients; pour into buttered baking dish, and cook in slow oven four hours, keeping dish covered until the last hour, stirring occasionally.
This is a baked Indian pudding with apple, and the ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the milk, the apples and the sweetening all appear in the method or the title but not in the measurements. Treat it as a framework rather than a formula.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal. Period recipes generally assume a fine to medium meal rather than a coarse polenta grind; a coarser grind will take longer to soften and may stay noticeably grainy.
- Missing quantitiesThe printed list gives no milk, no apples and no molasses or sugar, though the method calls for scalded milk and the title calls for apple. Standard Indian puddings of the period run about 4 cups milk and 1/2 cup molasses to 1/4 cup meal; anything beyond that is guesswork, and the omission should be acknowledged rather than papered over.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt to a quarter cup of meal is high by modern taste even in a quart of milk. Half that is closer to what most palates now want in a sweet pudding.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; "slow oven" in modern terms is roughly 275-325F. The long gentle heat is the point: it gelatinises the cornmeal and lets the milk take on a faint colour without curdling.
- Four hours is not paddingCornmeal puddings genuinely need the time. Cut it short and the meal stays gritty and the pudding will not set.
- Covered, then uncoveredKeeping the dish covered prevents a skin from forming while the meal hydrates. Uncovering for the final hour is what gives the browned top, so do not skip that stage.
- StirringThe recipe says only to stir occasionally; stirring a few times while the dish is covered keeps the meal from settling into a dense layer at the bottom.
- ServingA quart-scale pudding of this kind serves six to eight, warm, with cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream — the traditional New England pairing.
Indian pudding takes its name not from India but from "Indian meal," the colonial American term for maize meal as distinguished from English wheat flour, and the dish is essentially a New England adaptation of British boiled and baked milk puddings to the grain that actually grew there. It belonged to the era of the banked wood-fired oven, where a pudding could sit for hours in falling heat after the bread came out, and the four-hour bake persisted in printed recipes well after that kind of oven had gone out of use. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to sell chocolate and cocoa, but Maria Willett Howard filled it out with a full general household repertoire, and a thrifty regional standby was exactly the sort of thing a Boston kitchen of the period expected to find in the dessert chapter.