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Cheap and Good
2 quarts of milk. 3/4 pound of corn meal. 2 ounces of butter or minced suet. 6 ounces of molasses. 1 teaspoonful of ground ginger. 5 eggs. Little salt. Make the mush with 3 pints of the milk, add the rest cold, and the other ingredients. Bake about half an hour. Three heaping pints of corn meal mush ready made will do as well.
This is a baked Indian pudding built on cooked cornmeal mush, thinned with cold milk and bound with eggs. The book gives no oven temperature and no pan size, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: cook the meal fully firstThe half hour in the oven is only there to set the eggs, not to cook the grain. If the mush is still raw-tasting or gritty when it goes in, the pudding will be gritty; simmer the meal in the hot milk, stirring, until it is thick and smooth, at least 15-20 minutes.
- Weights to volumesThree-quarters of a pound of cornmeal is roughly 2 1/2 cups; 6 ounces of molasses is about 1/2 cup by weight (3/4 cup if the ounces are read as fluid ounces); 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. Two quarts of milk is 8 cups, of which 3 pints (6 cups) go into the mush and the last 2 cups go in cold to cool the mixture before the eggs.
- Corn meal means yellow or white cornmealPeriod "Indian meal" was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. Medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match; avoid degerminated fine meal, which turns pasty, and do not substitute corn flour or masa.
- Temper the eggsAdding the cold milk first is what makes the eggs safe to add without scrambling. Beat them and stir them in only once the mush is warm rather than hot.
- OvenBake at 350F. A moderate oven is what this pudding wants; higher and the custard curdles at the edges before the centre sets.
- TimingHalf an hour is optimistic for this quantity. In a buttered 3-quart dish expect 50-60 minutes, until the pudding is set at the rim and still slightly loose in the middle; a shallower pan will be quicker. It firms as it cools.
- Minced suetBeef suet gives a firmer, more savoury pudding and was generally the cheaper fat. Butter is the straightforward option; either should be stirred into the hot mush so it melts.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Serve warm with cold cream or milk poured over, a common nineteenth-century American way of eating it.
This is an Indian pudding under a thrift-minded title. "Indian" in early American cookery meant maize meal as opposed to English wheat flour, and Indian pudding was the colonial answer to a boiled or baked flour pudding: cornmeal, milk, molasses and ginger, all cheap. Molasses did the sweetening because West Indian sugar syrup reached New England ports in quantity and cost far less than refined sugar, and the ginger echoes the older English habit of spicing sweet puddings warmly. The variant offered at the end -- three heaping pints of ready-made mush will do as well -- suggests how the dish could live in a working kitchen: leftover breakfast mush, enriched with eggs and molasses, became the evening pudding.