Home › Desserts › Indian Tapioca Pudding
Indian Tapioca Pudding
cup pearl tapioca 6 cups scalded milk 1 cup Indian meal 1 cup molasses 1 cup butter 2 teaspoons salt 2 cups cold milk Soak tapioca in cold water over night. Cook Indian meal and scalded milk in double boiler twenty minutes; add tapioca, molasses, butter, salt. Pour into buttered baking dish; cook two hours in slow oven.
At the end of the first hour, add the cold milk. Serve hot with butter or cream.
A cornmeal Indian pudding with tapioca folded in, baked long and slow. Two of the printed quantities need judgment before you start.
- The missing tapioca measureThe first line reads "cup pearl tapioca" with no number, a dropped fraction in the original setting. A fraction of a cup rather than a full cup is the likely reading against six cups of milk; a full cup would set the pudding stiff.
- The butter is almost certainly overstatedThe butter may be overstated -- One cup of butter against six cups of milk and a cup of molasses will pool as grease on the surface. A few tablespoons is the safer reading if you are cooking from this.
- Indian mealPlain yellow or white cornmeal, stone-ground if you have it. Not masa, not cornstarch, and not the degerminated instant polenta that cooks out in five minutes.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no figure; a slow oven of the period is roughly 275-300F. The two hours are not negotiable downward: the point is to let the cornmeal swell and the milk sugars brown at the edges without the custard curdling.
- The cold milk is the hingeThe cold milk -- The recipe says only to add the two cups of cold milk after the first hour, without saying whether to stir. Poured over and left unstirred it gives the layer of thin whey beneath a set top associated with Indian pudding; stirred through, the result is uniform.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what a 1907 kitchen would have had on the shelf and will dominate the corn.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is on the high side for modern palates given that the butter is likely salted as well. Start with one.
- Vessel and yieldA deep 2 1/2 to 3 quart buttered dish; the pudding rises little but the cold milk needs somewhere to go. Serves eight to ten.
"Indian pudding" takes its name from Indian meal, the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from wheat flour, and the dish is the New England answer to a boiled wheat-flour hasty pudding: cornmeal, milk, and molasses baked for hours in the cooling bread oven. By the time Lowney's book appeared, molasses was cheap and pearl tapioca was available to home cooks, and the two turn up together in recipes of the period. The tapioca adds body and a slight translucency the plain cornmeal version lacks. Serving it hot with butter or cream, rather than a sauce, is the older Yankee habit; the scoop of vanilla ice cream often seen in New England restaurants is a later addition.