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Indian Pudding (Five cups of milk cup of corn)
Five cups of milk, 1-3 cup of corn meal, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar. Cook milk and meal in a double boiler 20 minutes; add honey, salt and ginger; pour into buttered pudding dish and bake 2 hours in a slow oven; serve with cream. a
— Mrs. Barber's Honey-Candy
1 quart honey, 1 small teacup of granulated sugar, butter size of an egg, 2 tablespoons strong vinegar. Boil until it will harden when dropped into cold water, then stir in 1 small teaspoon of baking soda.
Pour into buttered plates to cool. Without the vinegar and soda it can be pulled or worked a long time, and is just the thing for old-fashioned candy pull, as it is not sticky and yet is soft enough to pull nicely. an
Two recipes run together here: a honey-sweetened Indian pudding and Mrs. Barber's honey candy. Both are workable, but the pudding's ingredient list and its method do not quite agree.
- "1-3 cup of corn meal"Almost certainly a broken fraction for one-third cup, though the text is garbled enough that this is a reading rather than a certainty. Either way the ratio of meal to milk is very loose, and the pudding gets a long bake.
- Indian meal"Indian" in this context simply means cornmeal. Fine or medium yellow cornmeal is what the recipe assumes; coarse polenta grind will stay gritty even after the double-boiler stage.
- The ginger problemThe method calls for ginger but the ingredient list omits it, while listing a teaspoon of sugar that is never used. Reckon on 1 teaspoon ground ginger; the stray teaspoon of sugar can be dropped or added with the honey without consequence.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-300F. The long, low bake is the point: it gives the starch time to swell and the pudding to set gently. Too hot an oven and it is liable to separate and weep.
- The double boiler is not optionalCornmeal scorches in milk over direct heat faster than you can stir it. Twenty minutes over simmering water gelatinises the meal fully, which is what keeps it from settling into a gritty layer at the bottom of the dish.
- YieldFive cups of milk gives a pudding for six, served warm with cream poured over. It is traditionally quite loose — closer to a set custard than a cake.
- Honey candy temperature"hardens when dropped into cold water" is vague, and covers somewhere between hard-ball and hard-crack, roughly 255-300F on a thermometer. Honey scorches and turns bitter if pushed much past that, so watch it closely; it also foams higher than a plain sugar syrup, so use a deep pan.
- What the soda doesBaking soda stirred into hot syrup, with the vinegar as its acid, aerates it. Mrs. Barber's own note is that without both, the candy is "not sticky and yet is soft enough to pull nicely". Stir it in and pour at once; the mass will keep rising for several seconds.
- InfantsHoney should not be given to children under one year of age because of the risk of infant botulism. Neither the baking nor the boiling here is a reliable safeguard against the spores.
Indian pudding is one of the oldest surviving New England dishes, an adaptation of English hasty pudding made with cornmeal — "Indian meal" — because wheat was scarce and maize was not. The classic sweetener is molasses, so a version built on honey tells you exactly what kind of book this is: a collection out to show what a jar of honey could do beyond the breakfast table. Community and promotional cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently reworked standard dishes around a single ingredient in this way. Mrs. Barber's candy alongside it belongs to the taffy-pull tradition, a domestic entertainment in which the cooling sugar was worked by hand between two people until it turned pale and opaque — her note that honey candy is "not sticky and yet is soft enough to pull nicely" is the practical judgement of someone who had done it more than once.