Home › Puddings › Indian Pudding
Indian Pudding
1 quart milk
½ cup brown sugar
⅓ cup corn-meal
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup raisins
½ teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg
Place the milk in a double boiler and when it is scalding hot add avoid the meal, moistened with cold water, and stir constantly to -dish and lumps. Cook for twenty minutes. Turn into a pudding add all the other ingredients except the egg. Stir well and when the mass has cooked somewhat stir in the beaten egg. Bake for one hour in a rather slow oven and serve hot with hard sauce or any desired sauce. One-half cup dates or figs may be used instead of the raisins.
The typesetting here has scrambled: the phrases "avoid the meal, moistened with cold water" and "stir constantly to -dish and lumps" belong together as "add the meal, moistened with cold water, and stir constantly to avoid lumps," and the pudding is turned into a pudding-dish after the twenty-minute cook. Read in that order it is a straightforward stirred-then-baked cornmeal pudding.
- The hingeSlurry the cornmeal with a little cold water before it goes into scalding milk, and stir without stopping. Dry meal dropped into hot milk seizes into lumps that no amount of later baking will smooth out.
- A rather slow oven300 to 325F. Indian pudding is meant to set gently; at higher heat the custard curdles and the edges scorch before the centre firms.
- Corn-mealUse plain yellow or white cornmeal, ideally stone-ground and medium grind. Not self-rising cornmeal mix, and not corn flour or masa, which behave quite differently in liquid.
- Double boilerAny heatproof bowl over simmering water works. A heavy saucepan over low heat is fine too if you stir attentively; the double boiler exists only to stop the milk catching.
- Tempering the eggThe printed phrase is "when the mass has cooked somewhat"; on a page this badly set it may well be "cooled," and in either case the safe course is to let the mush drop below scalding before the beaten egg goes in, or whisk a little of the hot mush into the egg first. Straight into scalding mush, the egg scrambles into threads.
- Dish and depthA quart of milk plus additions comes to something over five cups, so a 1½-quart dish is the minimum and a 2-quart one is easier; butter it. Shallower and wider bakes faster; a deep dish may want longer than the stated hour.
- Yield and servingSix modest servings. Hard sauce is butter creamed with sugar and flavouring, served cold so it melts over the hot pudding; cream, plain or whipped, does the same job.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of brown sugar is restrained by period standards for this dish, which was more often made with molasses. A few tablespoons of molasses swapped in for some of the sugar gives the darker, more familiar flavour.
"Indian" in Indian pudding refers to the meal, not the pudding: English colonists called maize "Indian corn" to distinguish it from wheat, and cornmeal was long known simply as Indian meal. The dish is the New England answer to a boiled or baked English hasty pudding, made with the grain that was actually abundant, and it appears in American cookbooks continuously from the late eighteenth century onward. By the time the Butterick book was compiled, the long hearth-baked version, left in a cooling brick oven for the better part of a day, is often said to have been giving way to shorter recipes like this one, thickened on the stove first and finished in a gas or coal range in an hour. The note offering dates or figs instead of raisins is a small sign of what a well-stocked early twentieth-century pantry could reach for.