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Plain Baked Indian Pudding
2 quarts of water, or milk. 12 ounces of corn meal. 2 ounces of butter, or suet. 6 ounces of molasses (a tea cupful). 1 teaspoonful of ground ginger. 4 eggs. Little salt.
Make mush with the meal and water, and let it simmer about 2 hours. Then add the other ingredients and bake in a buttered milk pan nearly an hour. Makes 2 1/2 quarts.
A colonial-style baked cornmeal pudding, given by weight and with no oven temperature — both need translating. The long simmer before baking is the part that decides whether the result is silky or gritty.
- Start with the mushThe two-hour simmer is not optional padding; it fully hydrates and gelatinizes the coarse meal, which is what gives Indian pudding its smooth, almost custardy body. Cook it in a heavy pot over very low heat, or set the pot in a wider pan of simmering water, and stir often — cornmeal mush scorches readily once it thickens.
- Indian meal"Corn meal" here is what earlier books call Indian meal: stone-ground yellow or white maize meal, coarser than most supermarket cornmeal. Medium or coarse grind gives the closest texture; avoid fine degerminated meal, which turns pasty.
- Weights to volumes12 ounces of cornmeal is roughly 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 cups depending on the grind; 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. The 6 ounces of molasses the author calls "a tea cupful" is close to 1/2 cup by modern measure — a 19th-century teacup ran smaller than a mug.
- Oven heatNone is stated. Bake in a moderate oven, 325–350F, for the hour indicated; a custard-type pudding set faster than that will curdle at the edges.
- Adding the eggsThe mush will still be near boiling when the other ingredients go in. Let it cool until it is warm rather than hot, or whisk a ladleful into the beaten eggs first, then return the mixture — otherwise the eggs scramble in threads.
- The milk panA milk pan was a wide, shallow earthenware or tin pan, perhaps 3 inches deep. A buttered 9x13 baking dish or a wide shallow casserole gives the same broad surface and even heat; a deep narrow dish will need considerably longer than an hour.
- SuetThe alternative fat is beef suet, finely chopped. It is still sold by butchers, and it gives a firmer, plainer pudding than butter. Either works; butter is the easier choice.
- Yield and servingTwo and a half quarts serves ten to twelve. Serve warm, in bowls, with cold heavy cream poured over, a common accompaniment for this pudding.
Indian pudding takes its name not from India but from "Indian meal," the colonial term for maize meal, used to distinguish it from wheat flour, which in early New England was scarce and expensive. The dish is generally traced to English boiled and baked grain puddings — hasty pudding among them — remade with the grain the colonists actually had, sweetened with molasses rather than sugar because molasses arrived cheaply from the West Indies trade that ran through Boston and Newport. Puddings of this type are often said to have been baked in the cooling brick oven after the bread came out, which is why older versions call for hours of gentle heat; this one instead compresses the process into a long stovetop simmer followed by a short bake.