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Amber Pudding
Into a quart of boiling milk stir a teacupful of corn meal and one quart of sliced sweet apples; add one teaspoonful salt and one teacupful of molasses. Mix thoroughly. Add two quarts of milk; pour into a large, buttered dish and bake in a slow oven about four hours. When cold, a clear, amber-colored jelly will have formed throughout the pudding and apples will be a rich dark brown.
This is a baked Indian pudding under another name, and it is built on a very thin batter that thickens over hours rather than minutes. Read the volumes before you start: three quarts of milk needs a bigger dish than most people reach for.
- The hinge: do not stir once it is in the dishThe recipe never tells you to. The "clear, amber-colored jelly" most likely forms as the cornmeal settles and the remaining milk sets around it during a long, undisturbed bake. Stirring partway through, as some Indian pudding recipes direct, would work against the layered effect this recipe is named for.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; read it as somewhere in the 275-300F range. Much hotter and the surface is liable to skin and brown before the interior sets.
- TeacupfulRoughly 3/4 cup in period American usage, sometimes as little as 1/2 cup. Take it as 3/4 cup for both the cornmeal and the molasses; the pudding is forgiving on the molasses and less so on the meal.
- Corn meal"Corn meal" here is plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not degerminated fine meal and certainly not a self-rising cornmeal mix. Coarse meal gives a better texture over four hours; fine meal can turn pasty.
- Vessel and volumeThree quarts of milk plus a quart of apples wants a deep dish of at least five quarts, buttered, with an inch of headroom. A large enamelled roaster or a deep stoneware baking dish works; a standard 9x13 will overflow.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the apples. This is the only sweetener in the pudding, so the result is dark and mildly sweet rather than sugary.
- Sweet applesA period "sweet apple" means a low-acid variety, not a modern tart cooker. Golden Delicious, Gala or Fuji are closest in sweetness; a sharply acid apple such as Granny Smith will give a tarter dish than intended.
- Timing and donenessFour hours is realistic at 300F. It is done when the top is set and brown and a knife slid into the centre comes out coated but not with loose milk running behind it. It must cool completely, several hours or overnight, for the jelly to firm.
- YieldTen to twelve servings. Traditionally eaten cold or barely warm, with cream poured over.
Under the amber name this is New England Indian pudding, the cornmeal-and-molasses dish that filled the gap between English boiled hasty pudding and the American kitchen, where cornmeal was cheap and wheat flour was not. "Indian meal" was the old term for maize meal, and the pudding was long associated with the slow, dying heat of a brick oven after the bread came out, which is exactly the four-hour, low-temperature bake described here. The apples and the whey layer are a regional variation. Its appeal is easy to read: cheap, keeps well, and mostly cooks itself while the cook is doing something else.