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Boiled Indian Pudding
Warm a pint of molasses and pint of milk, stir well together, beat four eggs, and stir gradually into molasses and milk; add a pound of beef suet chopped fine, and Indian meal sufficient to make a thick batter; add a tea-spoon pulverized cinnamon, nutmeg and a little grated lemon-peel, and stir all together thoroughly; dip cloth into boiling water, shake, flour a little, turn in the mixture, tie up, leaving room for the pudding to swell, and boil three hours; serve hot with sauce made of drawn butter, wine, and nutmeg.- Mrs. A. E. Brand,
A classic boiled pudding of the molasses-and-cornmeal family, made in a floured cloth rather than a mold. The batter is stiff and the cooking long; nothing here is difficult, but a few of the materials and methods need translating.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal. Grinds varied by mill in the 1880s, and the meal was often finer than a modern coarse grind. Expect to need a good deal of it — the recipe gives no quantity — to bring a pint of molasses, a pint of milk and four eggs to a thick batter; add it gradually and stop when a spoon stands up briefly in the mixture.
- Beef suetA pound of finely chopped suet is the shortening and the richness both. Ask a butcher for fresh kidney suet, or use packaged shredded suet; grate or chop it cold so it stays in small pieces rather than smearing. Chilled unsalted butter, grated, is the usual substitute, though the texture is softer.
- The pudding clothThe hinge of the whole recipe. Scald the cloth, wring it, and flour the inside generously while it is still damp — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely enough for the meal to swell but not loose enough for water to seep in at the gathers.
- Keeping it boilingThe pot must stay at a steady boil for the full three hours, with the pudding lifted off the bottom on a plate or trivet and boiling water added as it evaporates. If the water goes off the boil the batter absorbs it and the pudding turns sodden.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity. A pint is 2 cups and makes a dark, quite sweet pudding by modern taste.
- Drawn butter sauceNot simply melted butter: drawn butter is butter thickened with a little flour and hot water into a thin sauce, here finished with wine (the recipe does not say which) and grated nutmeg. Whisk it warm and do not let it boil hard or it separates.
- YieldA generous pudding — enough for 10 to 12 servings. It reheats well steamed, and slices of leftover pudding were sometimes fried in butter.
Boiled Indian pudding is the American descendant of the English suet pudding, with cornmeal standing in where an English cook would have used flour or breadcrumbs; "Indian meal" was the standing colonial term for maize meal, distinguishing it from wheat "flour." Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and abundant in the coastwise trade long before refined sugar was, and the pairing of cornmeal and molasses lies behind baked Indian pudding and Boston brown bread as well, though neither of those uses suet. The pudding cloth was the ordinary vessel of a kitchen with one fire and one pot: the pudding cooked in the same water as the dinner and needed no oven at all. Its appearance here credited to a contributor by name is typical of the book's method, a compilation drawing on named household contributors.