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Mohawk Pudding
2 quarts of milk. 10 ounces of corn meal. 4 ounces of fresh butter. 6 ounces of reboiled black molasses. 5 whole eggs. 6 yolks. 1 large lemon. Pinch of salt.
Make mush in the usual way by bringing the milk to a boil, sprinkling in the meal and beating at the same time with egg whisk to prevent lumps. Stir over a fire a few minutes; then put on a tight lid to keep the steam in; push the saucepan to the back of the range and let the mush remain at cooking heat without burning, for two hours or more. Then turn it out into a pan and mix in the other ingredients--the eggs beaten light--the rind of the lemon grated and the juice squeezed in. Bake about half an hour, or till the egg in it is fairly set, and no longer.
This makes about 3 quarts of pudding; enough for the average orders of 50 persons. It can be baked in fluted pudding moulds, and turned out whole if handled carefully, where so required, or else in two small pans well buttered. A mild, neutral sauce is best with this. If hot sweetened cream cannot be had try the following, which is as ornamental as useful.
A hotel-scale cornmeal custard from a professional pastry manual: the yield is about 3 quarts, said to serve 50, so most home cooks will want to cut it to a quarter or a fifth. The whole dish turns on the long, slow mush stage and on pulling it from the oven the moment the egg sets.
- Scale it downA fifth of the recipe is roughly 1 2/3 cups milk, 2 oz cornmeal, 3/4 oz butter, 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons molasses, 1 whole egg plus 1 yolk, and the zest and juice of a quarter lemon. That makes about 2 1/2 cups of pudding, which sits comfortably in a 4-cup dish; by the original's own reckoning it would be ten of its small hotel portions.
- The two-hour mush is the pointCornmeal needs long hydration or the finished pudding is gritty. Lacking a coal range with a cool back corner, cook the mush in a heavy covered pot in a 275F oven, or over a pan of simmering water, stirring every half hour. It should be thick, glossy and taste of corn rather than raw starch.
- Corn mealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not degerminated instant. Sprinkle it into boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking, exactly as written; dumping it in guarantees lumps.
- Reboiled black molassesProbably the dark, twice-boiled molasses of the nineteenth-century trade rather than a refined table syrup. Modern dark (not blackstrap, which is harsh, and not light) molasses is the closest match. Six ounces is about half a cup, and it is the only sweetener in the whole pudding, so this is a mild dessert by current standards.
- Oven and donenessBake at 325 to 350F. Half an hour applies to a shallow hotel pan; a deeper dish will want 45 to 60 minutes. Stop when the center is just set with a slight wobble, around 170F on a thermometer. Past that the egg tightens and the pudding weeps whey.
- Cool the mush before the eggs go inTurning the mush out into a pan lets it cool as well as making it easier to mix. If it is still near boiling it will scramble the 5 whole eggs and 6 yolks. Let it drop to warm, then beat the eggs in.
- MouldingFor turning out whole, butter fluted moulds heavily, set them in a water bath, and let the baked pudding rest 10 minutes before inverting. Loosen the flutes with a thin knife first.
- SauceThe "mild, neutral sauce" the author wants is a thin vanilla custard sauce or plain hot cream with a little sugar. Anything sharp or heavily spiced fights the molasses and lemon.
Cornmeal puddings were among the oldest sweets in the New England repertoire, boiled or baked as "Indian pudding" from colonial times onward, when maize meal was cheap and wheat flour was not. Names like Mohawk Pudding may belong to a later commercial habit of giving standard hotel dishes regional or Native-American labels for the printed menu; no specific origin for this name is documented either way. What marks this version as a professional recipe rather than a farmhouse one is the enrichment and the arithmetic: eleven eggs and yolks in the custard, ten ounces of butter and molasses beyond the meal, a stated yield of fifty portions, and a note on which pans to use for banquet service. The two-hour rest at the back of the range suits a coal or wood range, the kind of steady low heat a hotel kitchen had all day and a modern cook has to reproduce deliberately.