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November 12
Menu: Hamburg Steak Balls; Mashed Potatoes; Fried Parsnips; Apple and Celery Salad; Baked Indian Pudding; Coffee Baked Indian Pudding-332 quarts milk, 3 tablespoons cornmeal, 1/2 pint molasses, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon ginger. Boil 1 quart milk; add to it molasses, Crisco, salt, and spices, and lastly meal stirred smooth with little cold milk; scald whole together, and turn into a well Criscoed baking dish. When it begins to crust over, stir it all up from bottom, and add 1 pint of cold milk. Repeat process every 1/2 hour, or oftener if pudding browns too fast, till 5 pints are used; then let it bake till done-6 hours in all. Serve hot with sauce of grated or granulated maple sugar stirred into rich cream, and kept very cold till needed.
A long, slow milk-and-cornmeal pudding of the New England kind, here rebuilt around Crisco in place of butter or suet. The method is unusual and worth reading twice before starting: the milk goes in by stages over several hours, not all at once.
- The milk quantityThe total is 3 1/2 quarts (14 cups): 1 quart is scalded with the meal at the start, and 5 further pints are stirred in a pint at a time. Whole milk gives the right body; skim milk will weep.
- Cornmeal proportionThree tablespoons of meal to 14 cups of milk is far thinner than other Indian pudding recipes of the period, and may well be a misprint; as printed the pudding would rely on six hours of evaporation and slow swelling of the starch rather than on any initial thickness.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. Six hours of baking suggests a slow oven; around 300F is a reasonable modern equivalent, dropping to 275F if the top browns before the half hour is up.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter and Gamble promotion, so shortening replaces the butter or beef suet older versions used. Three tablespoons of any neutral solid fat, or butter, behaves the same here.
- The stirring is the techniqueEach time a skin forms, break it up from the bottom and add the next pint of cold milk. This is what keeps the meal suspended and gives the finished pudding its layered, slightly whey-separated character rather than a solid block.
- MolassesHalf a pint is one cup. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than the table molasses of 1913 and will dominate the spices.
- Baking dishYou need something that holds close to 4 quarts with room to stir, deep rather than wide, and heavy enough not to scorch at the base over six hours.
- The sauceGrated or granulated maple sugar stirred into rich cream, kept very cold until it hits the hot pudding. Maple syrup can stand in, but use less and the cream will be looser.
- YieldTen to twelve servings. It reheats well.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial term for maize meal as distinct from wheat or rye flour, and the dish is essentially an English hasty pudding rebuilt on the grain that was actually available in New England. Molasses, arriving cheaply through the West Indies trade, supplied both the sweetening and the dark colour, and the very long slow bake suited a brick oven or a range's dying heat, when the fire was doing nothing else. Its appearance in a Crisco book is straightforward marketing: the 1913 Procter & Gamble Crisco volume — published both as The Story of Crisco and as A Calendar of Dinners — set out to show that the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every familiar American dish, so it collected old regional standards and wrote the product into them. The date attached, November 13, belongs to the book's calendar of dinners, which assigned a full menu to each day of the year.