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Baked Indian Pudding
Rinse out a saucepan with cold water, pour into it one quart of milk and heat slowly to the boiling point. Sift into it one cupful of cornmeal, stirring vigorously to prevent lumping. When well thickened add one teaspoonful of salt, cover and cook over hot water for half an hour, then set aside, still covered, until partly cooled. Add one-half of a cupful of molasses, two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped beef suet, one teaspoonful of sifted ginger, one teaspoonful cinnamon and one pint of cold milk. Turn into a greased earthen baking dish, pour over the top a second pint of milk and bake in a slow oven for four hours.
A classic hasty-pudding baked into custard. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings and the milk sequence do the work, and the pudding is ruined by rushing either.
- The hinge: do not stir in the top pintThe second pint of milk is poured over the surface and left alone. During the long bake it sinks slowly through the meal and sets as a soft custard layer over a denser base. Stirring it in gives one uniform, heavier pudding.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-300F, and it genuinely needs the full four hours. Raising the heat to shorten the time risks curdling the milk and leaves the cornmeal gritty rather than swollen and tender.
- CornmealUse plain stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising mix and not coarse polenta grind. Anything labelled fine to medium behaves as intended.
- Beef suetRaw hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and chopped or grated fine while cold. Shredded packaged suet works; two tablespoons of unsalted butter can stand in, though it makes a slightly less rich pudding.
- Rinsing the pan, cooking over hot waterThe cold-water rinse leaves a film that helps keep milk from catching on the bottom. "Cook over hot water" means a double boiler for the half hour of thickening, which is the surest protection against scorched cornmeal.
- Let the mush cool before the molasses and milkAdding cold milk to a boiling-hot cornmeal mush can seize it into lumps. Partly cooled means warm to the hand, not tepid.
- Dish and yieldAn earthen baking dish of at least three quarts, greased, set on a low rack. This serves six to eight.
- ServingIt comes out of the oven very hot and is best eaten warm, not scalding, with cold heavy cream poured over, or with vanilla ice cream in the later New England manner. A hard sauce also suits it.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from wheat flour, and the dish is essentially an English boiled or baked hasty pudding rebuilt around the grain that was actually available in New England. Molasses, cheap and abundant in ports tied to the West Indies trade, supplied the sweetening and the dark colour; ginger and cinnamon were common household spices. The four-hour bake suits the coal or wood range, where a slow oven was the oven some hours after the main cooking.