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Corn Meal Pudding
Etta C. Springer.
One quart of sweet milk, boiled; stir in four tablespoons of corn meal; stand till cool; put in four beaten eggs, sweeten to taste ; two tablespoons of butter. Bake two hours.
A plain baked custard thickened with cornmeal, of the family that includes Indian pudding. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no sugar quantity, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Two hours of baking suits a slow oven, roughly 300-325F. Higher heat will curdle the egg custard and weep liquid before the two hours are up.
- Cool the mush properlyThe hinge of the recipe. The boiled milk and meal must come down to lukewarm before the eggs go in, or they scramble into threads. Stand it 20-30 minutes and stir once or twice to stop a skin forming.
- Corn mealOften called Indian meal in books of this period, though this recipe uses "corn meal"; ordinary yellow or white cornmeal is the same thing. Fine stone-ground gives the smoothest set; coarse grits or polenta will stay gritty in two hours.
- A thin batterFour tablespoons of meal to a quart of milk is very little thickener by modern standards. Expect a soft, spoonable custard rather than something sliceable. Adding meal to a full half cup gives a firmer pudding closer to what most people now expect.
- Sweeten to tasteFor a quart of milk, 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar, or the same measure of molasses if you want the darker, more traditional Indian-pudding flavor. Stir it into the warm mush so it dissolves before the eggs.
- Stirring in the mealRain it into the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking, or it will set into lumps immediately. Let it cook two or three minutes to swell the starch before you take it off the heat.
- Water bathNot mentioned, but a buttered dish set in a pan of hot water keeps the edges from setting hard before the center is done. It is finished when a knife an inch from the center comes out clean and the middle still trembles.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk fills a 2-quart dish and serves six. Serve warm with cream or a spoon of molasses; a grating of nutmeg or cinnamon is period-appropriate and the recipe is bland without it.
Cornmeal boiled in milk and baked with eggs is one of the oldest genuinely American desserts, generally traced to the hasty pudding of English cookery once wheat flour was replaced by the native grain colonists called Indian meal. Alongside the sturdy molasses-and-spice version known as Indian pudding there was a delicate cousin like this one: mostly milk and egg, sweetened to taste, with just enough meal to give body. The attribution to Etta C. Springer is characteristic of the community cookbook form, in which recipes carry the name of the contributor -- and in which, as here, the sugar is left to taste and the oven is not described at all.