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Baked Indian Pudding
Two quarts milk, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup Indian meal, 3/4 cup sugar, butter size of an egg, 1/2 cup molasses, 1 tsp. Slade's ginger, 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon, 1 cup raisins, nutmeg and salt. Scald the meal in part of the milk, and let cool before adding other ingredients. Add the other half of milk, and bake in a very moderate oven, two hours or more, stirring once or twice the first half hour.
— Clara W. Taylor
A classic New England cornmeal pudding, baked long and slow so the meal swells into the milk. The recipe is sound as written; most of what needs translating is vocabulary and oven language.
- Indian mealThis is simply cornmeal — the old American name distinguishing maize meal from wheat flour. Fine or medium yellow cornmeal works; stone-ground gives more flavor and a slightly grainier set.
- Slade's ginger and cinnamonSlade's was a Boston spice house, and its ground spices were sold widely in New England around the turn of the century. Any ground ginger and cinnamon substitute one for one.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks often used the egg as a rough volume gauge; treat it as an approximation.
- A very moderate ovenAround 300–325F. Indian pudding wants low heat for a long time; much hotter and the eggs are apt to curdle and the custard to weep before the meal has finished swelling.
- Scalding the mealThis is the hinge. Cook the cornmeal in part of the milk until it thickens, then let it cool before the eggs go in, or you will scramble them. Ten minutes of stirring over gentle heat is enough.
- The remaining milkThe second half of the milk goes in after the other ingredients, thinning the scalded meal before it goes into the oven.
- Stirring in the first half hourStir once or twice as directed, then leave it alone. This keeps the cornmeal from sinking into a dense band at the bottom.
- Yield and dishTwo quarts of milk makes a large pudding — a 3- to 4-quart baking dish, serving ten or twelve. Halve it comfortably for a household. It is traditionally served warm with cream or vanilla ice cream.
- DonenessAfter two hours it should be set at the edges and still trembling at the center; it firms considerably as it cools. Longer baking, up to three hours, deepens the color and flavor.
Indian pudding is one of the oldest surviving American desserts, an adaptation of English hasty pudding made with maize meal because wheat was scarce and corn was not — hence "Indian" meal, the colonial term for grain of Native American origin. The molasses is equally historic: New England's rum-and-sugar trade made it the cheapest sweetener on the coast well into the nineteenth century, and it gives the pudding its dark color and faint bitterness. The Philathea books were fundraising collections from Philathea classes, adult women's Bible study groups within the Baraca-Philathea movement, and the signed contributions are the point: Clara W. Taylor's version, with its raisins and three spices, is a comparatively rich one.