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Indian Pudding
5 cups scalded milk 1/3 cup Indian meal 1/2 cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ginger Pour milk slowly on meal, cook in double boiler twenty minutes, add molasses, salt, and ginger; pour into buttered pudding-dish and bake two hours in slow oven; serve with If baked too rapidly it will not whey. Ginger may cream. be omitted.
A plain baked cornmeal pudding of the old New England kind, thickened first over water and then left in a cool oven for two hours. Its whole character depends on that long, slow bake.
- Keep the oven low"slow oven" is not defined here, but the term was generally used for something in the region of 250-325F. Baked hot, the pudding sets solid instead of separating into a soft custard with a layer of sweet whey beneath, which the recipe itself points to: "If baked too rapidly it will not whey."
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal. Use fine or medium yellow or white stone-ground meal; coarse polenta grind stays gritty over the two-hour bake.
- The ratio looks wrong but is notA third of a cup of meal to five cups of milk gives a very loose batter going into the dish. It thickens only partly, and should be spoonable rather than sliceable when done.
- Double boiler stageAdd the scalded milk to the meal in a slow stream while stirring, or it lumps. Twenty minutes over simmering water hydrates the starch; the mixture will still be thin.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. Add it after the cooking stage as written.
- Dish and depthA buttered 2-quart baking dish suits this quantity. A shallow wide dish loses too much liquid; the whey needs depth to gather.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight, warm, with plain cream poured over, as the recipe directs.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from the wheaten "flour" they had left behind. It is one of the oldest continuously cooked New England sweets, built from the three things a farm kitchen always had: cornmeal, milk, and molasses from the West Indies trade. Its long, slow bake suited the residual heat of a brick oven or the back of a wood range after the day's baking was done, which is why nineteenth-century versions commonly specify two hours or more. Its inclusion here, among the puddings, with the note that the ginger may be left out, shows the dish surviving into the era of measured cups as a homely standby rather than a novelty.