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Minute Pudding
Take sweet milk, or half water and milk, a pinch of salt, let boil, stir in wheat flour, as in making corn-meal mush, until same thickness as mush; remove from fire, and serve at once with sweetened cream flavored with nutmeg. Some think it improved by adding blackberries, raspberries or cherries, either canned or fresh, just before taking from stove.-
A stovetop flour porridge served as a dessert, given without quantities in the usual nineteenth-century style. A working ratio and a little patience with the flour are all it needs.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Roughly 1 cup of flour to 4 cups of milk (or 2 cups milk and 2 cups water) makes a pudding of soft mush consistency for four to six; more flour gives something stiff enough to slice cold.
- The hinge is lumpingFlour dropped into boiling milk seizes instantly. Whisk the flour into a cup of the cold milk to a smooth slurry first, then stir that into the rest at a bare simmer, or sift the dry flour in through your fingers while whisking hard.
- "Minute" is optimisticWheat starch thickens in a minute or two, but raw flour tastes pasty. Keep it over low heat, stirring, for 8 to 10 minutes after it thickens so the flour cooks out.
- ScorchingA thick flour mush catches on the bottom of a thin pan very quickly. Use a heavy saucepan, keep the heat low once it begins to set, and stir into the corners.
- "Sweetened cream flavored with nutmeg"Not whipped cream: pouring cream stirred with sugar to taste and a grating of fresh nutmeg, ladled over the hot pudding. Fresh nutmeg is worth the trouble here; the pre-ground kind is largely flat.
- "As in making corn-meal mush"The book assumes the reader is familiar with cornmeal mush and knows the target texture: thick enough that a spoon leaves a trail, loose enough to pour.
- Adding fruitStir berries or pitted cherries in at the very end, off the heat, so they warm through without breaking down and thinning the pudding. Canned fruit should be drained well.
- ServingServe immediately in warm bowls. It stiffens to a solid mass as it cools; leftovers can be pressed into a dish, chilled, sliced and fried in butter.
Minute pudding belongs to the large family of boiled flour and meal puddings — hasty pudding, stirabout, mush — that fed American households when an oven fire was an expense and a pot on the stove was not. The name is a plain claim about speed: unlike a batter or suet pudding that boiled in a cloth for two or three hours, this one is on the table in the time it takes to thicken. Its appearance in a dessert section shows how thin the line was between breakfast porridge and pudding; the same pot of mush became one or the other depending on whether it met salt and butter or sweetened cream and nutmeg. The suggestion that the berries may be either canned or fresh is itself telling, an offhand equivalence between the two.