Home › Recipes › Baked Millet Seed Pudding
Baked Millet Seed Pudding
1 1/2 pounds of millet seed. 2 quarts of milk and water. 6 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of sugar. 5 eggs. Little salt 1 quart more milk to mix up, Nutmeg flavor.
Wash the millet seed and let it cook at the back of the range about 3 hours, in the 2 quarts of milk and water; Then mash it a little and mix in the rest of the ingredients. Raisins, currants, etc., may be added. The preceding is a trifle richer in eggs than the steamboat pudding was. Syrup for sauce.
A hotel-scale grain pudding written for a cook who already knew the form; the quantities are for a crowd and the oven stage is left entirely unstated.
- Millet seedThis means hulled millet, the pale round grain sold today for pilafs and porridge, not birdseed millet still in its husk. Rinse it well; unrinsed millet carries a faintly bitter dust.
- Milk and waterThe proportion of the 2 quarts is never given. A half-and-half split is the safest reading, and gives a grain that cooks soft without scorching as readily as straight milk.
- The back of the rangeThat is the coolest part of a coal range — a bare simmer. On a modern burner use the lowest setting with a heavy pan and a lid. Hulled millet will be soft well before three hours, in roughly 45 to 60 minutes; the long original timing suits a fire that could not be turned down.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. Bake a pudding of this kind at 350F until the custard is just set and barely trembles at the centre, roughly 45 to 60 minutes in a deep dish.
- The eggsFive eggs go into a hot cooked grain. Beat them with some of the reserved quart of cold milk first, then stir that into the millet off the heat, or you will get threads of scrambled egg through the pudding.
- The extra quartThe final quart of milk is there to loosen the mash back to a pourable batter. Add it gradually — millet varies in how much it drinks — and stop when the mixture is thick but still slack, since it firms considerably in the oven.
- Weights6 ounces of butter is a stick and a half; 8 ounces of sugar is about a cup and an eighth. The 1 1/2 pounds of millet is roughly 3 1/2 cups dry.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield or pan size. With three quarts of liquid plus the grain it makes a very large quantity, enough for well over a dozen servings; quartering it gives something close to a family-sized dish.
- Sauce"Syrup for sauce" means a thin sugar syrup or molasses served warm in a boat, not poured over before baking. Maple syrup works and suits the nutmeg.
Baked grain puddings were the backbone of institutional dessert cookery in nineteenth-century America — cheap, filling, and forgiving of a cook working at volume — and millet appears here as one of several interchangeable grains alongside rice, sago, tapioca and hominy. The author's aside that this is "a trifle richer in eggs than the steamboat pudding" is the giveaway about the book's audience: these are recipes scaled for hotels, restaurants and the dining saloons of river and coastal steamers. Millet had long been a European and Asian porridge grain; it never displaced rice in the pudding repertoire, and by the twentieth century it had drifted out of American cookbooks almost entirely, which is why the phrase "millet seed" now reads oddly to anyone who has only met the grain in a feed store.