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Indian Pudding (Mix one cup of yellow corn)
Mix one cup of yellow corn meal, one cup of molasses, and one teaspoon of salt. Pour on one quart of boiling water, add one tablespoonful of butter, three pints of cold milk, and one cup of cold water, and two eggs. Bake in deep, well-buttered pudding dish holding at least three quarts. Bake very slowly seven or eight hours. Do not stir, but cover with a plate if it bakes too fast.
A cup of currants may be used to give variety.
A long, slow baked cornmeal pudding of the New England type, unusually wet even by the standards of the genre. The liquid is what makes it work, and the low oven is what keeps it from curdling.
- "Very slowly" means 250-275F"Very slowly" means a low oven -- Period books differ on what they call slow, but for a seven- or eight-hour bake something in the region of 250 to 275F is a reasonable modern reading. Much hotter and the milk and eggs risk curdling and weeping before the meal has swelled.
- The liquid looks wrong and is notA quart of boiling water, three pints of milk and another cup of cold water to one cup of meal comes to nearly three quarts of liquid. It sets over the long bake as the cornmeal absorbs it. Resist the urge to reduce it or you will get cornbread.
- Use a big enough dishThree quarts is the stated minimum and it is a genuine minimum. A wide, shallow dish will skin over and set too fast; a deep three- to four-quart stoneware or enamelled dish gives the slow, even heat this wants.
- Do not stirThe instruction is deliberate. Left alone, the meal settles and the milk rises, and the pudding bakes into distinct layers with a custardy top. Stirring during baking gives a uniform, heavier mush.
- Cornmeal has changed"Yellow corn meal" here means a stone-ground meal coarser than most modern supermarket cornmeal, and definitely not the fine, degerminated boxed sort. A medium stone-ground meal gives the right texture; fine meal will thicken faster and taste flatter.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity. A full cup is the only sweetening in the pudding.
- CurrantsThe optional cup almost certainly means dried currants rather than fresh. The recipe does not say when to add them; scattering them over the surface rather than stirring them through will keep them from all sinking.
- Yield and servingAround three quarts of pudding, so roughly ten to twelve servings. It is usually eaten warm rather than hot, with cold heavy cream poured over; ice cream is a later accompaniment. It reheats well the next day.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from the wheat, rye and oat flours brought from Britain. The dish is essentially an English boiled or baked hasty pudding rebuilt around the one grain that grew reliably in New England, sweetened with molasses because molasses came cheap through the West Indies trade while refined sugar did not. Long, slow cooking was not a stylistic choice but a practical one: the pudding went into the brick oven or the back of the range after the bread came out and stayed there on falling heat, which is why so many nineteenth-century versions specify times measured in hours rather than minutes.