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Boiled White Corn Meal Pudding
1 pound of white corn meal (scant quart). 1 quart milk. 4 ounces of sugar. 6 ounces of chopped suet. A little salt. 3 eggs. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. 2 teaspoonfuls of extract ginger.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it; sprinkle in the meal and stir it over the fire five minutes.
Then take it off, mix in the suet, salt, eggs beaten and ginger. Wet and flour a pudding bag; place it in a bowl; pour in the pudding; tie loose enough for it to swell to nearly double its bulk; drop in plenty of boiling water and keep it boiling 5 hours. When to be taken up, dip it a moment in cold water and it will come out of the cloth smooth. Serve with butter and sugar hard sauce.
A stiff cloth-boiled cornmeal pudding of the old hotel kitchens, closer to a suet pudding than to a soft Indian pudding. Two things decide whether it works: how loosely you tie the cloth, and keeping the pot at a genuine boil for the full time.
- The bag must have roomThe meal keeps swelling for hours, and a tightly tied cloth produces a dense, cracked mass. Tie so the pudding can reach nearly double its bulk, and expect the finished shape to be a rough dome rather than anything neat.
- QuantitiesA pound of white cornmeal is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups by modern measure, close to the book's own "scant quart." With only a quart of milk this is a very stiff batter, closer to a dough once the meal has taken up the liquid.
- SuetSix ounces of beef suet, chopped fine or shredded, from a butcher; packaged shredded suet (including the vegetarian kind) works and disperses more evenly. It should be cold and finely divided, since it needs to melt through the meal rather than pool.
- Extract of gingerThis was generally an alcoholic tincture of ginger root sold by druggists rather than a modern flavouring extract, and strengths varied. About 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, or a tablespoon of finely grated fresh, gives a comparable warmth.
- The lemonJuice and rind are listed but never mentioned again in the method. Add them with the eggs, off the heat, so the acid does not meet the hot milk directly.
- Eggs into hot mushThe cooked meal will still be very hot after five minutes on the fire. Let it cool a few minutes and beat the eggs in briskly, or temper them with a spoonful of the mixture first, or you will get threads of scrambled egg.
- Five hours of boilingThat is not an exaggeration for a pudding of this density, but the water must stay at a rolling boil and must cover the pudding throughout. Top up with boiling water, never cold, and keep the bag off the bottom of the pot with a plate or a folded cloth.
- Turning outThe recipe relies on the brief cold-water dip to release the cloth cleanly. Do it briefly, seconds rather than a minute, then untie and invert at once.
- Yield and sauceServes eight to ten as a substantial winter dessert. The hard sauce is simply butter creamed with sugar, uncooked, and is meant to melt into the hot slices.
Boiling a pudding in a floured cloth was the standard method in English and American kitchens for centuries before pudding basins and steamers became common, and it survived longest for heavy suet mixtures like this one. The cornmeal is the American element here; white meal gives a paler, milder pudding than yellow, one that can take lemon and ginger without fighting them. The suet, the long boil and the hard sauce all belong to a cold-weather, high-calorie style of dessert. Ginger sold as a druggist's extract rather than as a ground spice is another period marker.