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Baked Indian Pudding
6 cups milk 1/4 cup corn meal 1 cup molasses 1 tablespoon butter teaspoon salt few grains ginger Scald one pint of milk with corn meal and cook twenty minutes; add remaining milk and rest of ingredients. Pour into deep earthen dish and bake, set in a pan of hot water, in a slow oven, four hours. The afternoon fire is the one best suited for cooking this pudding.
A long, slow baked custard thickened with cornmeal rather than eggs. Nothing about it is difficult, but the four hours are not negotiable — that is what turns the meal from gritty to silky.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figures; "slow oven" in this period is usually read as roughly 275-300F, and the lower end is safer if your oven runs hot. The pudding should never bubble at the edges; it sets by long, gentle absorption.
- Corn mealIndian meal is cornmeal — yellow, stone-ground if you can get it, and not the degerminated fine grind sold for cornbread mixes. Coarser meal gives the traditional slightly grainy body.
- Scalding stageWhisk the 1/4 cup meal into 2 cups (one pint) of milk while it is still cool, then bring it up slowly and cook 20 minutes over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring. Meal dropped into hot milk lumps immediately.
- SaltThe original line reads simply "teaspoon salt." A full teaspoon is not out of line for this quantity of milk and molasses; use half a teaspoon if you prefer it less salted.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate the dish. A full cup to six cups milk is a moderately dark, distinctly New England pudding.
- Vessel and water bathA deep earthen dish means a stoneware or ceramic baking dish of at least 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, since the milk and molasses alone come to nearly two quarts. Set it in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up the sides and top the water up once or twice during the long bake.
- Yield and servingServes eight generously. Eat it warm rather than hot, with cold heavy cream poured over, or with vanilla ice cream in the later New England manner.
- The afternoon fireThe last remark assumes a wood or coal range banked down after the midday meal. In a modern oven the equivalent is simply putting it in mid-afternoon for supper.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from wheat flour, and the dish is essentially an English milk-and-grain pudding rebuilt around the one grain that grew reliably in New England. Molasses, cheap and abundant through the West Indies trade, replaced sugar, and the very long slow bake made it a dish of thrift rather than labor. The closing note about the afternoon fire is a survival from the era of the wood range, though a banked afternoon fire was in use across a very long period and so dates the recipe only loosely.