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Mock Indian Pudding
Butter on both sides three slices of white bread, add one quart of milk, two-thirds of a cup of molasses, and a little salt. Bake slowly about two and a half hours, stirring often until well mixed. Serve with cream.
A thrifty stand-in for New England Indian pudding, using buttered bread instead of cornmeal. The method is sound but the original assumes a coal range holding a low steady heat all afternoon.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature. Around 300F, in a buttered dish deep enough that the milk does not boil over, is a reasonable modern reading; much hotter and you risk the custard curdling and the molasses catching over two and a half hours.
- The hinge: stir, then stopThe recipe asks for stirring often until well mixed, so the bread breaks down and disperses instead of floating as a raft. Once it is mixed, leaving it alone for the last stretch lets it set with a skin on top.
- Tear the breadButter the slices, then tear or cube them before the milk goes in if you want them to disperse quickly. The recipe leaves the slices whole and relies on repeated stirring.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is more bitter than what was generally sold as "molasses" around 1900 and will dominate the pudding. Two-thirds of a cup is generous; a half cup may suit modern palates better.
- BreadThe recipe calls for three slices of plain white bread, roughly 3 oz. Stale bread is the usual assumption for puddings of this kind, though the recipe does not say so. Enriched sandwich bread with sugar and softeners gives a pastier result; a lean loaf or day-old French bread is closer to the intent.
- Salt"A little salt" against a quart of milk means about half a teaspoon. Without it the molasses tastes flat.
- Serve with creamPouring cream, unwhipped, over the pudding while it is still warm. Serves four to six as a dessert.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, the colonial term for cornmeal, and belongs to the New England tradition of long-baked meal-and-molasses puddings conventionally traced to English hasty pudding. Molasses did the sweetening because it arrived cheaply in the northeastern ports through the West Indies trade, and the pudding was set in the cooling brick oven or the back of the range after the day's baking. A "mock" version substituting stale bread for cornmeal is exactly the sort of thrift a cook would record: the flavor comes from molasses, milk and slow heat rather than from the grain, so the grain could be swapped for whatever the breadbox held. The same logic gave the period mock turtle soup, mock cherry pie and mock oysters.