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Indian Fruit Pudding
3 pints of milk or water. 12 ounces of corn meal 6 ounces of suet chopped fine. 6 ounces of molasses (small cupful.) 1 teaspoonful of ground ginger. 5 eggs. 1/2 pound of raisins. 1/2 pound of currants. Salt Cinnamon. Make mush, add the other ingredients. Bake in a slow oven about an hour.
A baked Indian pudding enriched into something closer to a plum pudding. The whole thing hinges on cooking the meal into a proper mush first; skipped or rushed, the cornmeal stays gritty and the pudding weeps.
- Make the mush properlyWhisk the 12 oz cornmeal into the 3 pints of milk or water and cook, stirring, until it is a thick porridge that pulls from the pan — 15 to 20 minutes on low heat. Cornmeal needs that time to hydrate; the oven will not finish the job for you.
- Cool before the eggs go inThe recipe says only "add the other ingredients." Let the mush drop below scalding, or the five eggs will scramble in it. Beat them and stir in a ladle of warm mush first, then combine.
- A slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "slow" is conventionally read as somewhere around 300F. The recipe allows about an hour. Test with a knife at the middle and give it longer if the centre is still loose.
- Corn mealNineteenth-century American books use "corn meal" and "Indian meal" interchangeably for stone-ground yellow or white maize meal, coarser than most supermarket cornmeal today. Medium grind gives the closest texture; avoid fine cornflour and avoid degerminated instant polenta.
- SuetSix ounces of beef suet, chopped fine, not rendered. Butchers will still supply it and shredded packet suet works; frozen butter grated on a coarse box grater is a common stand-in, though it melts sooner.
- The molasses measureSix ounces is given as "a small cupful," which is roughly half a US cup by volume. Unsulphured dark molasses is right; blackstrap is harsher than anything intended here.
- CurrantsZante currants — small dried grapes — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. With the raisins that is a full pound of dried fruit, so the pudding is heavy and needs a deep dish.
- Salt and cinnamonBoth unmeasured. A rounded teaspoon of salt and one to two teaspoons of cinnamon suit this quantity.
- Vessel and yieldA buttered 3-quart baking dish, or two 8-inch dishes. It serves ten to twelve, warm, with cream or a hard sauce.
"Indian" in an American recipe title almost always means maize: colonists called it Indian corn, and Indian meal was the cheap everyday grain against imported wheat flour. Plain Indian pudding -- meal, milk, molasses, long slow baking -- was a New England staple, and this version dresses it up in the clothes of an English plum pudding with suet, raisins, currants, eggs and spice. Molasses was the sweetener at hand in a port economy trading with the West Indies. Baking rather than steaming, and in a slow oven at that, is what develops the dark colour and faintly caramelised edge that distinguishes the American pudding from its boiled British cousin.