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Indian Pudding, Boiled
One pint of molasses; one pint of milk; one pound of suet; four eggs; one teaspoon of cinnamon; one-half teaspoon of nutmeg; one teaspoon salt; Indian meal. Warm the milk, and add the molasses, stirring well together; then beat the eggs vigorously, and stir them thoroughly into the liquid. Chop the suet fine, and add it and the rest of the ingredients together with sufficient meal to make a rather thick batter; boil three hours and serve with wine sauce. very
A boiled suet pudding of the old New England type, sweetened entirely with molasses and thickened with cornmeal. The instructions assume you already know how to set up a pudding mold or cloth, so that is the part worth spelling out.
- Indian meal is cornmealYellow or white cornmeal, medium grind; stone-ground gives the best texture here. Do not substitute corn flour or masa, and avoid coarse polenta grind, which stays gritty even after three hours.
- How much mealThe recipe leaves this open, and meals vary in absorbency, so the amount has to be judged by eye: add it gradually until the batter mounds on the spoon but still drops from it. Cornmeal keeps swelling, so let the batter stand five minutes before judging it.
- SuetA pound of beef kidney suet is a great deal of fat by modern taste; it is what makes the pudding rich and keeps it moist. A butcher will supply it, often on request. Chop or grate it while cold so it stays in distinct flecks rather than smearing.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. The pudding gets all its sweetness and most of its color from this pint.
- Boiling means steamingBoiling -- Fill a well-greased pudding mold or basin two-thirds full and cover tightly, or tie the batter in a floured cloth, which is traditionally lowered straight into boiling water. For a covered mold, set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it falls; if the pot goes dry or the water stops moving, the pudding will be heavy in the middle.
- Testing and turning outA skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Let it rest ten minutes before unmolding, or it may slump.
- Wine sauceWine sauce of this period is generally a butter-and-sugar sauce thinned with sherry or Madeira. Hard sauce, or cream and maple syrup, serves the same purpose. Serve the pudding hot; suet puddings turn waxy as they cool.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten servings, and small ones are appropriate given the richness. Leftovers reheat well in slices, steamed or fried in a little butter.
- The stray wordThe "very" at the end appears to be a stray fragment rather than part of the method. Ignore it.
"Indian pudding" takes its name from Indian meal, the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from the wheat and rye flour brought from Europe; the dish itself is an English hasty pudding or boiled batter pudding rebuilt around the grain that was actually abundant in North America. Molasses did the same work in place of expensive refined sugar, arriving cheaply in New England ports through the West Indies trade, which is why the two ingredients appear together in so many nineteenth-century American puddings. Many versions are baked slowly for hours in a cooling brick oven; the boiled form here belongs to the older tradition of the pudding cloth and the pot already on the fire. Boiling rather than baking also gives a softer, moister result, closer to a steamed dumpling than to the set custard most people now expect from Indian pudding.