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Baked Indian Pudding
A quart sweet milk, an ounce butter, four well-beaten eggs, teacup corn meal, half pound raisins, fourth pound sugar; scald milk and stir in meal while boiling; let stand until blood warm, stir all well together; bake one and a half hours, and serve with sauce. - Mrs. Carrier.
A plain baked cornmeal custard, thickened on the stove and set in the oven. The original gives no temperature, so the two things to supply are heat and a dish.
- The hinge: blood warm means blood warmThe scalded meal mush must cool to about 98-100F before the eggs go in, or they curdle and the pudding turns grainy. It should feel neither warm nor cool on the inside of the wrist.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; a moderate oven of about 325-350F suits it, and at the lower end the custard sets more evenly over the hour and a half.
- A teacupTeacups in American books of this period were not standardised, and are usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, so roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of cornmeal to the quart of milk. The result is soft and spoonable rather than sliceable; a full cup gives a firmer pudding.
- Indian mealThis means cornmeal, and in a Southern book most likely a fine white or yellow stone-ground meal. Modern degerminated supermarket meal absorbs slightly less liquid; coarse polenta grind will stay gritty unless the mush is cooked several minutes rather than merely stirred in.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber also kept in the kitchen. Whole milk is the right choice here.
- ScaldingBring the milk to the boil with the butter (the recipe has the meal going in "while boiling"), then rain the meal in while whisking so it does not lump. Let it thicken to the consistency of thin porridge before setting it aside to cool.
- The dishUse a buttered baking dish of at least 2 1/2 quarts; the mixture comes to close on two quarts. Set it in a pan of hot water if you want a silkier custard and no browned edge; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and barely trembles.
- Yield and sauceServes six to eight. The unnamed sauce would have been a hard sauce, a lemon or nutmeg sweet sauce, or simply cream; anything sharp or lemony offsets the sweetness of the raisins.
Indian pudding is among the long-established dishes of American cookery, taking its name from "Indian meal," the colonial term for maize meal as distinguished from English wheat flour. The New England version is a long, slow affair sweetened with molasses and baked for hours; the version here is lighter and faster, closer to a cornmeal custard, enriched with eggs and raisins and sweetened with white sugar. Crediting a recipe to a contributor by name is typical of the late nineteenth-century compiled cookbook, in which recipes were gathered from many contributors rather than written by a single author. The instruction to serve it "with sauce" and nothing more assumes a reader who already keeps a pudding sauce or two in her repertoire.