Indian Pudding
For the benefit of those who maintain that the baked Indian pudding of pioneer days, deserves a place of honor on this day, we give a time-honored rule. Pour one pint of rich scalded milk over three heaping tablespoonfuls of yellow cornmeal. The meal that is freshly ground always makes the sweetest and best pudding. Add to the hot mixture a pint of cold milk, a heaping tablespoonful of butter and half a cup of molasses and a little salt and bake the pudding in a slow oven for five hours. It should turn as dark as molasses cake and be of a jelly-like consistency. Serve it with cream.
A pudding of almost nothing — cornmeal, milk, molasses — that depends entirely on a long, low bake. The proportions look wrong until you understand that the meal is meant to swell slowly rather than set into a solid.
- Slow ovenA slow oven in books of this period is around 275-300F. Keep it low: too hot a bake risks curdling the milk and scorching the molasses at the edges before the center thickens.
- Five hours is not a mistakeThe long bake is what turns the pudding dark and gives it the jelly-like set described here. Cutting it to two hours leaves a pale, gritty, soupy dish. Cover loosely with foil if the top skins over too early.
- The cornmeal"Yellow cornmeal" here would most likely have been stone-ground rather than the fine degerminated meal sold in most supermarkets; the recipe itself only insists it be freshly ground. Medium or coarse stone-ground meal gives the texture the recipe is after. Three heaping tablespoons is roughly a third of a cup.
- Rich milkNineteenth-century "rich milk" was closer to today's whole milk with a little cream stirred in. Use whole milk, or replace a quarter of it with half-and-half; skim milk produces a watery pudding.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what the writer had in mind. Half a cup is the whole sweetening — there is no sugar in the dish.
- VesselA buttered 1 1/2-quart baking dish, deep rather than wide, set in the oven without a water bath. The mixture will look alarmingly thin going in.
- StirringStir the pudding once or twice during the first hour to keep the meal from settling into a layer on the bottom, then leave it alone for the rest of the bake so a skin can form.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as written. The "cream" of the last line means plain heavy cream poured over, cold, against the hot pudding — that contrast is the point, and vanilla ice cream is the modern stand-in.
Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial English term for maize meal as distinct from the wheat, rye and oat "flour" they knew at home. English settlers had brought a habit of boiled and baked milk puddings thickened with grain, and cornmeal was the grain at hand; molasses, cheap and abundant through the West Indies trade, supplied the sweetening. The dish is generally associated with New England, where it was long baked in the residual heat of a brick oven after the bread came out — which explains the five-hour instruction better than any modern oven can. By the time this book appeared — the page itself gives no date — the pudding had become a nostalgia dish rather than a staple, which is exactly the note the compiler strikes in defending its "place of honor on this day," a day left unnamed beyond the reference to "pioneer days."