A Nice Indian Pudding

History

A Nice Indian Pudding turns on one New World substitution. Where an English hasty pudding leaned on wheat, colonists who lacked it rebuilt the dish on "fine Indian meal" — cornmeal — scalded into hot milk until it swells. The grain had come to them from Native Americans, and its "Indian meal" gave the pudding its name. Recipes for hasty pudding are documented in England as far back as the seventeenth century; the corn version is the American turn.

Simmons prints two techniques side by side. Her first two receipts scald cornmeal into milk, enrich it with eggs, butter, and sugar or molasses, and bake it — one for an hour and a half, the other for two and a half. Her third leaves the oven out entirely: the meal is salted, wetted with milk, tied into a strong cloth, and boiled for hours. Boiled in the cloth, the pudding stays close to a porridge; baked low and slow, it sets into something nearer a custard.

Indigenous cooks across the Americas had their own cornmeal gruels and puddings, though a Native cook worked without the milk or molasses a colonial kitchen took for granted. The sweetening in Simmons's version — sugar or molasses and warm spice — echoes the molasses-or-maple choice the surviving record ties to the dish's New England form.

This is, as far as the record shows, the dish's first appearance in print: American Cookery (1796) was the first cookbook to set New England specialties like Indian pudding and johnnycake down on the page. What the record does not keep is who actually ate Indian pudding, or what it signified in a 1796 household — nor whether Simmons devised these receipts herself or simply set down common practice. Those are silences worth naming rather than filling.

Ingredients

• 3 pints scalded milk
• 7 spoons fine Indian meal
• 7 eggs
• 1/2 pound raisins
• 4 ounces butter
• spice and sugar

Instructions

1. No. 1: Stir 7 spoons fine Indian meal into 3 pints scalded milk while hot and let stand till cooled.
2. No. 1: Add 7 eggs, 1/2 pound raisins, 4 ounces butter, spice and sugar; bake one and a half hours.
3. No. 2: Salt 1 pint meal, stir into 3 pints scalded milk, cool, add 2 eggs, 4 ounces butter, sugar or molasses and spice; bake two and a half hours.
4. No. 3: Salt a pint of meal, wet with a quart of milk, sweeten, put into a strong cloth or vessel secured from wet, and boil 12 hours.