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Brown Indian Souffle
Perhaps not the connoisseur's pudding, but thought by many to have less style and more real comfort in it than any other. It is something of a curiosity for its puffy lightness, and should be served whole in that condition as soon as done, or else dish it up, if you wish to secure for the bubble reputation, out of the oven's mouth.
You will never know it at its best, unless you can procure the old-fashioned, thick, black molasses. 3 pints of water. 12 ounces of corn meal. 1 pound of re-boiled black molasses. 8 ounces of butter. 8 eggs.
No salt needed but what is in the butter, and take care that it has not too much.
Make mush by sprinkling the dry meal into the boiling water, and beating at the same time with the egg whisk. When it has boiled a minute or two put in the butter and molasses, stir together, put on the lid and push the saucepan to the back of the range to simmer about an hour, It is not very apt to burn. Then turn the mixture into a pan, beat the 8 eggs a little and gradually stir them in.
Bake in a slow oven about 45 minutes. Makes about 2 1/2 quarts. Eat hot with cream, or, failing that, make this sauce, which will relieve its want of color.
This is a baked Indian pudding lightened with eggs until it puffs. Nothing about it is difficult, but two details — the molasses and the slow oven — decide whether it succeeds.
- Corn meal, not "Indian meal" finenessCorn meal grind -- Twelve ounces is roughly 2 1/2 cups of stone-ground yellow cornmeal. Fine or medium grind gives the smooth mush the batter depends on; coarse polenta grind stays gritty even after the hour of simmering.
- "Re-boiled black molasses"Most likely dark, unsulphured molasses that has been boiled a second time and so concentrated; the closest thing today is a robust or "full-flavour" dark molasses. Blackstrap is a step further and turns the pudding bitter; light or "mild" molasses will make it bland and pale, which is the failure the author warns against when he insists on the old-fashioned thick, black kind.
- A slow ovenRoughly 300-325F, at the low end of the range a period cook would have called slow. Hotter and the sugars in the molasses scorch at the edges before the centre sets.
- The hour on the back of the rangeEquivalent to the lowest burner setting, covered, with a heavy-bottomed pan; stir every fifteen minutes or so. This long simmer fully gelatinises the meal and is what makes the finished pudding tender rather than sandy.
- Adding the eggsLet the mush cool from boiling to merely warm before the beaten eggs go in, and stir them in gradually as directed, or they will scramble in streaks. The mixture should be pourable, like a thick batter.
- Serve it the moment it leaves the ovenThe puff comes from steam and egg, not from any leavener, and it begins to fall within a minute or two. The author's advice to dish it "out of the oven's mouth" is the whole point of the dish.
- Vessel and yieldAbout 2 1/2 quarts of batter needs a 3-quart baking dish with straight sides to climb, and serves eight to ten. A wide shallow dish will brown before the centre sets.
- The sauce that is not hereThe closing line points to a sauce printed with the recipe but not reproduced on this page. Cream is what the text names first, and is entirely sufficient.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from wheat flour, and the dish is essentially a hasty pudding — cornmeal boiled in liquid — sweetened with molasses and baked. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and abundant in New England ports, arriving from the Caribbean in the same trade that supplied the region's rum distilleries, while refined sugar stayed comparatively expensive into the nineteenth century. Here the old farmhouse pudding is pushed toward the French repertoire by the eight eggs and by the name soufflé. The author's slightly defensive opening — not the connoisseur's pudding, but more real comfort in it — suggests where the dish stood socially.