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Fourteenth Day: Indian
One cup of butter and two of sugar rubbed together to a light cream; yolks of two well-beaten eggs stirred in, then one cup hot (not boiling) wine. Whites of the AUNT JANE'S COOKING CLASS. 215 eggs to be beaten to a froth and stirred in at the last moment before serving. No. 194-RICH INDIAN PUDDING.
Eight tablespoonfuls meal (heaping), six eggs, one quart milk, six oz. sugar, a quarter of a lb. butter, one glass wine. Scald the milk and wet every particle of the meal with it; then add the other ingredients. Bake slowly two hours. This requires no sauce.
No. 195-PLAIN INDIAN PUDDING.
Boil a quart of milk and pour it on a pint and a quarter of corn meal; mix until every grain has been wet with the milk; boil for ten minutes, stirring occasionally; then add half a pint molasses, one teaspoonful ginger and the same of salt. Bake three-quarters of an hour in a slow oven.
No. 196-SUET INDIAN PUDDING.
One quarter of a pound suet, chopped fine, half a tumbler molasses, half a teaspoonful salt, one pint corn meal, one pint boiling milk, half a pint cold milk, two teaspoons ginger and the same of cinnamon. Put together as in the above recipe, except that the meal is to be mixed with the cold milk before being scalded. Both these puddings should be eaten with sauce. "There, Mabel, will those be enough for you?" "Oh, yes, plenty; I just thought I'd like to write them down while I had a good chance, because I can't write so fast as the rest can. Now I'll go to work and make my pudding."
Four items run together here: the tail end of a foaming wine sauce, then three Indian puddings ranging from rich to plain. The caution above applies to the wine sauce at the head of the page, not to the baked puddings.
- Why the cautionThe wine sauce sets two beaten yolks into creamed butter and sugar, adds wine that is explicitly kept below boiling, and folds in raw beaten whites at the moment of serving. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would make raw egg safe, and the alcohol and warmth do not sterilise it. If you want a foaming pudding sauce, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian" here means Indian corn, that is, maize. Use a fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not the coarse polenta grind and not a self-rising cornmeal mix, which carries leavening and salt.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is conventionally reckoned somewhere in the region of 275-325F. The rich pudding at two hours and the suet pudding both want that; the plain pudding's three-quarters of an hour is brief by modern standards and will give you a soft, loose pudding rather than a set, caramelised one. Long, slow baking of two to three hours is the usual modern treatment for a molasses Indian pudding.
- The hinge: wet every grainBoth instructions insist the meal be wetted particle by particle with scalded milk. Cornmeal dumped into liquid clumps, and the dry centres of those clumps never hydrate, leaving gritty pockets in the finished pudding. Pour the hot milk over the meal in a thin stream while whisking, or slake the meal in the cold milk first as the suet version directs.
- Volume measures of mealA pint and a quarter of cornmeal is roughly 12 to 13 oz by weight; a pint is about 10 oz. "Eight heaping tablespoonfuls" in the rich pudding is genuinely imprecise, since a heaping spoon varies by half again depending on the hand; figure somewhere near 3 to 4 oz and expect a custardy, barely thickened pudding rather than a stiff one.
- Tumblers and glassesA tumbler is about a cup, so half a tumbler of molasses is roughly 1/2 cup. "One glass wine" means a wineglass, conventionally about 1/4 cup; a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira is often what such books mean by "wine" in a pudding.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is a butcher's item now. It should be chopped or grated very fine and cold so it disperses rather than melting into a layer. A quarter pound is 4 oz.
- Yield and servingThe rich pudding would fill something like a 2-quart dish and serve six to eight; the plain and suet versions are of broadly similar bulk. The rich one is meant to stand alone, the other two want a pouring sauce, and hard sauce or plain cream both suit them.
Indian pudding is the New England descendant of English hasty pudding, in which wheat flour or oatmeal was stirred into boiling milk. Colonists substituted the maize meal they had, and because it was called Indian meal to distinguish it from wheat flour, the pudding took the name; sweetened with molasses from the West Indies trade and spiced with ginger, it is generally said to have become a familiar baked pudding of the northeastern kitchen, though the earliest printed American versions come late in the eighteenth century. What is telling in this page is the range: the same dish appears as a plain molasses-and-ginger family supper, as a heartier suet version, and as a "rich" one with six eggs, a quarter pound of butter and wine, which drops the molasses altogether and moves the thing toward a cornmeal custard for company. Six Little Cooks was a children's cookery book cast as a story, and Mabel copying the recipes down because she cannot write as fast as the others is the frame the book uses throughout to teach girls the dishes.