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Boiled Indian Pudding
2 tablespoons chopped suet 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 quart milk 2 cups Indian meal 5 tablespoons molasses 1½ tablespoons flour 1 cup seeded raisins Scald the milk and pour it over the meal; add the molasses, suet, salt, and the raisins washed and dredged with the flour. Put the pudding into a mold or bag and boil four hours. Serve with butter and maple syrup.
The raisins may be omitted if desired. 1 egg, 1 cup sugar
A steamed cornmeal pudding of the old New England type, cooked in a cloth or a covered mold rather than an oven. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and the water level decide whether it works.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, yellow or white, in the days when it was stone-ground and fairly coarse. A medium grind gives the right texture; fine degerminated supermarket cornmeal will absorb the milk faster and set denser.
- Scald and swellThe hinge of the recipe. Bring the milk just to the point of steaming, around 180F, and pour it over the meal, then let it stand and thicken before the other ingredients go in. Cold milk stirred in later leaves the meal gritty after four hours of boiling.
- SuetBeef suet from the kidney, asked for at a butcher counter, chopped fine or grated when cold. Two tablespoons is a modest amount; unsalted butter or shortening substitutes acceptably, though the pudding will be slightly less firm.
- Mold or bagGrease the mold well and fill it no more than two-thirds; the meal swells considerably. A pudding cloth should be scalded, floured on the inside, and tied loosely for the same reason. A covered pudding basin standing on a rack in a large pot is the easiest modern equivalent.
- Boiling waterWater should reach halfway up a mold, or cover a bag entirely, and stay at a steady low boil for the full four hours. Top up with boiling water, never cold, and check every 40 minutes or so. A dry pot scorches the pudding and can crack the mold.
- The flour on the raisinsDredging the washed raisins in the 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour keeps them from sinking through the loose batter. Do not add the flour separately to the milk.
- The stray last line"1 egg, 1 cup sugar" appears after the instructions with no place in them. What it belongs to is unknown; it may be a fragment of an adjoining recipe on the same page. Treat the pudding as complete without it rather than guessing where it goes.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts of batter, serving six to eight. It reheats well by steaming.
Boiled Indian pudding descends from the English boiled and suet puddings that colonists in North America adapted to the grain they actually had: maize, called Indian corn, hence "Indian meal." Cooked in a cloth or basin in the pot rather than in an oven, it suited kitchens where a hearth fire was always going and baking heat was an occasion. Molasses does the sweetening here, as it commonly did in New England cookery well into the nineteenth century, when West Indian molasses was cheaper and more reliably at hand than refined sugar.