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Baked Indian Richest
2 quarts milk and 12 ounces corn meal. 10 ounces of butter. 1 large coffee cupful of molasses. 1 large lemon, juice and grated rind. 12 eggs well beaten. Butter the bottom of a kettle and make mush in it of the milk and corn meal and let it simmer with the steam shut in an hour or two. Then mix in the other ingredients and bake about half an hour.
This is the top-of-the-scale version of baked Indian pudding — a hotel-sized quantity built on a cooked cornmeal mush enriched with a dozen eggs. The original assumes you know how a custard behaves; the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- Cool the mush before the eggs go inThis is the hinge. Two quarts of hot mush will scramble twelve beaten eggs on contact. Let the cooked mush drop to warm-not-hot (about 120F) before stirring in the butter, molasses, lemon and eggs, and add the eggs last, in a thin stream, whisking.
- Measures12 ounces of cornmeal is about 2 1/4 cups; 10 ounces of butter is 2 1/2 sticks. A "coffee cupful" was never a fixed measure, so read a large one as a generous cup of molasses.
- "Steam shut in"Cover the pot tightly and hold the mush at a bare simmer, stirring often on the bottom, where scorching starts. An hour is enough to hydrate the meal fully; the longer two-hour cook simply makes it smoother. A heavy pot or a double boiler saves you the vigilance.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. A modern 350F is a reasonable choice, in a buttered shallow dish or two so the depth is no more than about two inches.
- Half an hour is optimisticThat timing suits a thin pudding in a hot oven. In a modern 350F oven a batch this size wants 45 to 60 minutes, and longer if you bake it deep. It is done when the centre is just set and no longer sloshes; a knife an inch off-centre should come out clean.
- The lemonGrate the rind before juicing, and stir juice and rind into the cooled mush rather than into hot milk, where the acid can make the dairy look curdled.
- YieldOnce the mush has cooked down, the finished mixture comes to roughly 3 quarts of batter — a dozen or more servings. Halve it comfortably for a household. Serve warm with cream, as was commonly done with Indian pudding.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses this book assumes.
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 descendant of a boiled or baked grain pudding made with cornmeal instead of oats or wheat. In its plainest form it is meal, milk, molasses and a long slow bake, cheap enough to be a weekday standby through the nineteenth century; molasses, cheap and abundant in Atlantic ports, did the sweetening long before refined sugar was ordinary in a household. What sets this version apart is the extravagance welve eggs — which pushes the pudding away from thrift and toward a baked custard, the cornmeal now a thickener rather than the point. The instruction to simmer the mush "with the steam shut in" reflects a kitchen where long, low cooking was easily managed.