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Baked Indian Pudding
Two quarts scalded milk with salt, one and one-half cups indian meal (yellow); one tablespoon of ginger, letting this stand twenty minutes; one cup molasses, two eggs (saleratus if no eggs), a piece of butter the size of a common walnut. Bake two hours. Splendid.
A New England Indian pudding in its plainest form: cornmeal, molasses and milk, baked slow and long. The original gives no oven temperature and no dish size, so both need filling in.
- Indian meal is cornmealYellow cornmeal, stone-ground or medium grind, is exactly right. Do not substitute fine degerminated meal alone if you can avoid it; it sets softer and loses the slight grit that gives the pudding its character.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus is an early chemical leavening — potassium, later sodium, bicarbonate — effectively baking soda. The recipe offers it as a stand-in when eggs are short but gives no quantity; about half a teaspoon is a reasonable modern reading. It will lighten the pudding rather than bind it. With the two eggs, no soda is needed.
- A walnut of butterA piece the size of a common walnut, out of the shell, is roughly one tablespoon.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven note, only "Bake two hours"; a slow oven, 300-325F, suits that length of bake. Higher heat curdles the milk and toughens the edges before the center sets.
- The twenty-minute stand mattersScalding the milk and letting the meal swell in it for twenty minutes hydrates the cornmeal and helps limit its settling into a gritty layer at the bottom. Do not shorten it, and stir once or twice while it sits.
- Dish sizeTwo quarts of milk plus the meal makes a large pudding. Use a buttered 3- to 4-quart baking dish and set it in a pan of hot water if your oven runs uneven; the pudding should still be loose and trembling when it comes out, not firm.
- The ginger is assertiveA full tablespoon of ground ginger in two quarts of milk is a strong, old-fashioned seasoning. It is not an error, but a teaspoon or two suits most modern palates, and cinnamon or nutmeg is a common addition.
- Yield and servingTen to twelve servings. Serve warm, spooned into bowls, with cold heavy cream poured over — that contrast is the point of the dish.
Indian pudding is the baked descendant of colonial hasty pudding, the stirred cornmeal mush that stood in for the wheat-flour puddings of England. "Indian meal" was the standard American term for maize meal, used to distinguish it from oatmeal or wheat flour, and it survived in cookbooks well past 1900. The molasses is not incidental: it was the cheap sweetener of the Northeast, arriving through the West Indies trade, and its slight bitterness against the cornmeal is what separates this from a simple sweet custard. Long, slow baking suited the falling heat of a brick oven or the back of a wood range, which is why two hours appears without further comment. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributed receipts by Chicago householders in the 1870s, and the terseness here — no oven note, no pan size, no yield, just "Splendid" at the end — is typical of a dish the contributor assumed every reader had already eaten.