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Indian Pudding
5 cups of milk 1/3 cup of meal 1 teaspoon of salt 1/2 cup of molasses 2 tablespoons butter chopped 1 teaspoon of ginger Cook the milk and meal in a double boiler 20 minutes; add the other ingredients. Put the mixture in a pudding dish and bake two hours. Serve with hot maple molasses and butter, or cream.
A classic New England baked cornmeal pudding, written for a cook who already knew what oven to use and how thin the batter should look. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the meaning of "meal," and the fact that this bakes very loose.
- Meal means cornmealIn American books of this period "meal" without qualification is Indian meal, i.e. cornmeal. Fine or medium yellow or white stone-ground cornmeal is right; do not use masa harina, corn flour, or coarse polenta grind, which will stay gritty.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names none. A slow oven, around 300F, suits a two-hour milk-and-meal pudding: it sets the custard gradually and lets the molasses darken. Much hotter and the edges are liable to break and weep before the centre thickens.
- It looks far too thinA third of a cup of meal to five cups of milk gives a batter close to heavy cream after the double-boiler stage. That is correct. The pudding thickens in the oven and continues to set as it cools; it should still quiver in the middle when you take it out.
- Vessel and yieldUse a 2-quart buttered baking dish, deep rather than wide, and stand it in the oven with room around it. Five cups of milk serves six to eight in small portions.
- Butter "chopped"Diced cold butter, stirred in after the meal has cooked so it melts into the warm mixture rather than frying at the bottom of the pan.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity and will dominate the ginger.
- StirringSome recipes direct that the pudding be stirred down once or twice during the first hour, which keeps the meal suspended and gives an even texture; left alone it sets denser at the bottom with a skin on top. This recipe says nothing either way.
- "Hot maple molasses"Warmed maple syrup, served with a lump of butter melting into it. Cold heavy cream poured over the hot pudding is the other traditional service.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American term for maize meal, used to distinguish it from the meal of other grains. It descends from English boiled and baked milk puddings, with cornmeal standing in for the oats, rice, or wheat of the mother country, and is generally traced to New England, where it is traditionally said to have been baked in the cooling brick oven after the bread came out -- which would account for the low heat and the very long time.