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Boiled Corn Meal Pudding
1 pound of corn meal (nearly a quart.) 1 quart of milk. 1/4 pound of sugar. 6 ounces of chopped suet. 3 eggs. Little salt. 1 lemon--juice and grated rind. 1 teaspoonful of ginger, ground or extract.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it; sprinkle in the meal and stir it over the fire 5 minutes. Add the other ingredients. Tie up in a bag with room enough to swell to nearly twice its bulk; boil 5 hours.
Butter and sugar or hard sauce, meringue sauce, or golden sauce are most suitable for the three puddings preceding.
A book is advertised which foretells all the disasters that will befall this poor earth in the next seven years. Also, at the same time, Scribner's publishes an article presaging to hotel people the calamity of an avalanche of dried peaches. Now, what have we done? It may be all very true about the Delaware plains being "the peach garden of the continent, where the peach trees stand in rows a mile long, luxuriating in a warm and mellow soil and a genial climate, and every farm counts its hundreds or thousands. There are forests of twenty thousand peach-trees standing in prim and stately lines. Some large estates count ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand trees in one block. With a fair crop there will be five million baskets of peaches on these trees. A good crop will yield six million baskets--more peaches than the nation can eat while they are in good condition." That is pleasant; so is this: "when, in April days, the blossoms of these million trees foretoken an abundant crop, the good news is telegraphed over the country." Yes, it is good news; everybody glories in millions; we all love plenty. It is the conclusion that makes us unhappy. There is a new industry springing up. They have learned how to dry millions of baskets as peaches as easy as rolling off a log, as if there was not too many dried peaches already. The dried peach is a good thing abstractly considered, yet, when presented in a practical shape to the hotel guest, a little of it goes quite a long way. The taste for it has to be cultivated, and it is tedious work for the cooks. Dried peaches keep well, but it does hotel people no particular good to keep them. They might pay the Indians their annuities, perhaps, in dried peaches, and get rid of the Delaware surplus in that way. If it will do any good towards checking the growing evil to show how to use up peaches, green or canned. here are a few ways to go on with, and some more may be studied up after a while.
A stiff suet pudding of the boiled-in-a-cloth school, printed here with one of the author's trade-paper digressions attached. The recipe proper is short; almost everything that can go wrong happens at the bag stage.
- The bag is the whole jobA pound of meal in a quart of milk gives a very stiff mixture that swells hard as it cooks. Scald a square of unbleached cotton or a large square of muslin, wring it out, dust the inside heavily with flour to form a seal, and tie loosely so the pudding can expand to nearly double as directed. A tight bag splits; a loose knot lets water in and the pudding turns to mush.
- Boil means simmerKeep the pot at a bare simmer with the pudding fully covered, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. Water at a hard rolling boil batters the cloth and the pudding sits on the bottom and scorches. A plate or trivet under the bag helps.
- Five hours is long even for thisFive hours is long — the 5-hour boil follows the usual practice for dense suet puddings, but a mixture this stiff will likely be set and sliceable well before the full time. Test with a skewer to the centre rather than relying on the clock.
- Corn meal"Corn meal" here is plain yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising and not the finest degerminated grind sold as corn flour. Medium grind behaves closest to the original. The parenthetical "nearly a quart" is the author's own volume check; by modern measure a pound of cornmeal runs about 3 to 3 1/2 cups, a little short of a quart.
- SuetSix ounces of chopped beef suet, about 3/4 cup packed. Ask a butcher for kidney suet and chop or grate it cold, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen grated unsalted butter will work but gives a denser, greasier crumb, since butter melts at a lower temperature than suet and does not hold the mixture open the same way.
- Add the eggs off the heatThe meal is cooked in the milk for five minutes, which leaves it near boiling. Let it cool to warm before beating in the eggs and suet, or the eggs scramble and the suet melts out instead of staying in flakes.
- Ginger"Ground or extract" gives a choice the original saw as equivalent; they are not. Use a teaspoon of ground ginger. Ginger extract, if you can find it, is far stronger by volume and should be dosed by taste.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten servings. Turn the pudding out of the cloth while hot, let it stand a few minutes so the surface dries, and slice it in wedges. The sauces named -- butter and sugar, hard sauce, meringue, golden sauce -- are all sweet and rich, which this pudding needs; on its own it is fairly plain.
- The peach passageEverything after the sauce recommendation is editorial commentary, not part of the recipe. It introduces a run of peach recipes that followed in the book.
Boiled puddings tied in a floured cloth were the workhorse sweet of English and American kitchens before reliable ovens were common: they cooked over the same fire as everything else and needed no pan. This one is the American variant, substituting cornmeal for the wheat flour or breadcrumbs of a English suet pudding, and cornmeal puddings of both boiled and baked kinds appear throughout nineteenth-century American cookery, with Indian pudding as the best-known relative. The digression that follows the recipe is a reminder of what this book actually was: a work written for professional hotel and restaurant cooks, its pages carrying trade gossip, complaints about supply gluts, and running commentary alongside the formulas. The Delaware peach boom he grumbles about was real, and the new commercial fruit-drying industry he treats as a calamity was one of the period's genuine growth trades.