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Half-Hour Pudding
Beat four table-spoons butter to a cream with half a pint powdered sugar; add the yolks of three eggs, beating them in thoroughly, then a rounded half pint of corn meal, and the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Mix well, and bake in a pudding dish, well buttered. Serve hot with sauce.
A short, eggy cornmeal pudding with no flour, no milk and no chemical leavening — the beaten whites are the only lift it gets, so how you fold them decides whether it rises or sits flat.
- Fold, don't stirThe batter is stiff and the whites are the only leavening. Loosen the yolk-and-meal mixture with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in with a light hand; "mix well" here does not mean beat well.
- Half a pint is one cupSo: one cup of sugar and a rounded cup of cornmeal, to four tablespoons (half a stick) of butter and three eggs. "Rounded" means heaped slightly above the rim, perhaps an extra tablespoon or two.
- Powdered sugar meant something elseIn 1880s usage this is granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated, or superfine if you have it, is the right substitution.
- Use fine cornmealCoarse stone-ground meal has no liquid here to soften it and will bake up gritty. Fine-ground yellow or white meal gives the tender crumb the recipe intends.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a shallow egg batter of this kind.
- The name is the timingThe name probably points to the timing -- Half an hour in a buttered 1-quart dish or an 8-inch round is about right; test with a skewer at 25 minutes. It will be closer to a sponge cake than to a boiled pudding.
- Serve immediatelyWith no fat beyond the butter and no moisture beyond the eggs, it firms and dries as it cools. "Serve hot with sauce" is instruction, not suggestion.
- The saucePeriod pudding sauces of this kind include a hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and a spirit) or a thin lemon or vanilla sauce. Something sharp cuts the sweetness better than a creamy one.
- YieldFour to six modest servings.
Cornmeal puddings run through American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, most famously as Indian pudding — a long, slow, milk-based affair that could occupy an oven for hours. This one is the counter-example, and its name is the whole argument: no scalded milk, no molasses, no half a day of baking, just eggs and meal and sugar creamed together and into the oven. The Dixie Cook-Book appeared in the 1880s, compiled for Southern households where cornmeal was the everyday grain rather than a regional novelty, and a pudding built from pantry staples that could be got onto the table between the start of cooking and the end of dinner had obvious appeal. The technique — creaming butter and sugar, then folding in whipped whites — is borrowed straight from cake making, which is why the result eats more like a sponge than like a dense, spoonable pudding.