Indian Pudding
from Washington Woman
from Washington Woman
Indian pudding, is not, as some dinner table wags would have you believe, a pudding made of Indians. It’s a dessert of fundamental simplicity that recalls one thread of America’s culinary heritage and it’s colonial history.
Indian pudding is also the type of dessert Americans don’t make anymore. Replaced by an international array of pastries, mix-based cakes, and miles of aisles stacked with cookies, long-cooked puddings of grain mixed with copious amounts of eggs and milk are dishes of a farmstead past. Mixed of readily available ingredients and left to bake in the waning heat of wood-stocked oven, puddings were economical and filling, with a porridgey, stick-to-your-ribs strength.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, another name for cornmeal, a quintessential new world food and the basis of ancient Indian cultures. Corn was quickly adapted by European settlers to familiar recipes. But corn, unlike wheat flour, has no gluten and so cannot rise like a yeasted wheat bread. Early settlers fought and fussed with cornmeal and successfully adapted it to slow baked pudding. In its most traditional version, Indian pudding is an earthy mix of molasses and milk that burnishes and mellows in the oven, slow cooked at barely more than 200 degrees.
Today, most cooks think of puddings as soft custard deserts, made from boxed powder in a variety of garish colors. Traditional puddings, from old English and Colonial American recipes are really more like exceptionally moist cakes, sometimes steamed, other times baked in a wood- burning oven that has spent most of its heat on bread and pies.
Puddings were housewife-friendly, perhaps a colonial version of convenience food, if not exactly fast food. They were mixed with ingredients at hand and in season. Amelia Simmons who wrote American Cookery, considered the first American cookbook, adapted English recipes to American ingredients like “pompkin” and “cramberries.” Simmons offers three recipes for “A Nice Indian Pudding” that vary in the amount of meal to milk, in the number of eggs, and in their cooking time, from as little as one and a half hours to as much as six hours. She also offers a number of other puddings made with rice, bread, flour, cream, almond, apple, pears, plums, potato, carrot, squash, pumpkin, orange, and lemon.
Another New England cookbook writer and cooking teacher, Mary Lincoln, suggests putting the pudding in a “Saturday afternoon oven where the fire will keep it low nearly all night. Let it remain overnight, and serve for Sunday breakfast.” These directions have an unreachable luxury. By comparison, a box of Aunt Jemima pancake powder is a dim prospect.
The most memorable pudding has to be Dickens’ Christmas pudding. Despite being steeped in the sage and onions of their goose, the highlight of Chratchit’s Christmas dinner is the pudding. “A smell like an eating house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next to that! That was the pudding.” The Cratchits take deep pride and satisfaction in their pudding, despite that fact that “it was a small pudding for a large family.”
Indian pudding even took on a political cast in Colonial America. In opposition to the Stamp Act that would have taxed tea, a breakfast staple, Benjamin Franklin responded to an anonymous writer who believed that Americans could not hold their resolution to boycott tea, since Indian corn could not provide an “agreeable or easily digestible breakfast.” On the contrary wrote Franklin, Indian corn “is one of the most wholesome grains in the world.” He goes on to outline the vast and very agreeable dishes to be made from corn, none of them nearly so indigestible as the Stamp Act.
Indian pudding’s burnished sweetness comes from molasses, a by-product of sugar refining. Poor soil turned New England farmers into traders and molasses was one arm of the triangular trade in manufactured goods, slaves, and molasses. It was a trade that gave distinctive flavor to both American cooking and history. Molasses was eventually overtaken by chocolate. When Dr. James Baker of Dorchester Massachusetts started manufacturing little squares of unsweetened chocolate in the 1760s it was only used as a restorative drink. But by 1906 the first recipes for brownies appeared and after the 1930s when Mrs. Ruth Wakefield stumbled onto chocolate chips at Toll House restaurant, chocolate went on its way to becoming an American addiction.
The Puritan aspect of Indian pudding’s appearance may account for its wane in popularity, but it has also been passed by the technology of home cooking. A long slow cooking in a modern oven is not an economical use of otherwise wasted heat, but an added expense. Accurately measurable oven temperatures, along with reliable chemical leaveners like baking powder and soda made cakes a sure thing for home bakers. Even the advent of the egg-beater, hand turned or electric, turned a chiffon cake from a patissier’s speciality into a homey treat.
My first encounter with Indian pudding was at Boston’s Durgin Park restaurant. I ordered it with no idea what to expect, and its first appearance was daunting. A mound of sludgy brown, even with the ice cream, offered little eye appeal. But by first bite, I was entranced. It was at once chewy and creamy, dark and light, hot and cold; an unintentional Zen of dessert.
In fact, Boston is one of the few places you can find this old-fashioned dessert on restaurant menus, though chefs rarely offer it in its classical form. The recently revived Locke-Ober restaurant offers Indian Pudding tricked out with two tablespoons of white rum (a congenial blend, being a by-product of molasses). Sudbury’s Wayside Inn, made immortal by the poet Longfellow, offers “hot Indian pudding from the bakeshop.”
But Durgin Park’s Indian pudding is the standard. Chef Tom Ryan has been cooking 30 gallons of it three times a week for the past 42 years. He learned the recipe from Helen Goodman who cook for 35 years before him. And it’s as popular as ever, says Ryan. “Regulars order it, and everyone else is curious to try it. You can’t really describe it for them.”
My family makes Indian pudding every year as a Thanksgiving tradition. Or rather, my husband does. When we first met, I tested him at Durgin Park and he passed with flying colors. In fact, he’s the one who insisted on recreating Indian pudding when we moved to Washington.
When it comes to the table dark and fragrant, guests are either put-off or intrigued. Unless they are New England expatriates; then they are delighted. We are always glad to have leftovers though , which make a luxurious breakfast the next morning, even more so, served with a sinful spoonful of vanilla ice cream.
Indian pudding is also the type of dessert Americans don’t make anymore. Replaced by an international array of pastries, mix-based cakes, and miles of aisles stacked with cookies, long-cooked puddings of grain mixed with copious amounts of eggs and milk are dishes of a farmstead past. Mixed of readily available ingredients and left to bake in the waning heat of wood-stocked oven, puddings were economical and filling, with a porridgey, stick-to-your-ribs strength.
Indian pudding takes its name from Indian meal, another name for cornmeal, a quintessential new world food and the basis of ancient Indian cultures. Corn was quickly adapted by European settlers to familiar recipes. But corn, unlike wheat flour, has no gluten and so cannot rise like a yeasted wheat bread. Early settlers fought and fussed with cornmeal and successfully adapted it to slow baked pudding. In its most traditional version, Indian pudding is an earthy mix of molasses and milk that burnishes and mellows in the oven, slow cooked at barely more than 200 degrees.
Today, most cooks think of puddings as soft custard deserts, made from boxed powder in a variety of garish colors. Traditional puddings, from old English and Colonial American recipes are really more like exceptionally moist cakes, sometimes steamed, other times baked in a wood- burning oven that has spent most of its heat on bread and pies.
Puddings were housewife-friendly, perhaps a colonial version of convenience food, if not exactly fast food. They were mixed with ingredients at hand and in season. Amelia Simmons who wrote American Cookery, considered the first American cookbook, adapted English recipes to American ingredients like “pompkin” and “cramberries.” Simmons offers three recipes for “A Nice Indian Pudding” that vary in the amount of meal to milk, in the number of eggs, and in their cooking time, from as little as one and a half hours to as much as six hours. She also offers a number of other puddings made with rice, bread, flour, cream, almond, apple, pears, plums, potato, carrot, squash, pumpkin, orange, and lemon.
Another New England cookbook writer and cooking teacher, Mary Lincoln, suggests putting the pudding in a “Saturday afternoon oven where the fire will keep it low nearly all night. Let it remain overnight, and serve for Sunday breakfast.” These directions have an unreachable luxury. By comparison, a box of Aunt Jemima pancake powder is a dim prospect.
The most memorable pudding has to be Dickens’ Christmas pudding. Despite being steeped in the sage and onions of their goose, the highlight of Chratchit’s Christmas dinner is the pudding. “A smell like an eating house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next to that! That was the pudding.” The Cratchits take deep pride and satisfaction in their pudding, despite that fact that “it was a small pudding for a large family.”
Indian pudding even took on a political cast in Colonial America. In opposition to the Stamp Act that would have taxed tea, a breakfast staple, Benjamin Franklin responded to an anonymous writer who believed that Americans could not hold their resolution to boycott tea, since Indian corn could not provide an “agreeable or easily digestible breakfast.” On the contrary wrote Franklin, Indian corn “is one of the most wholesome grains in the world.” He goes on to outline the vast and very agreeable dishes to be made from corn, none of them nearly so indigestible as the Stamp Act.
Indian pudding’s burnished sweetness comes from molasses, a by-product of sugar refining. Poor soil turned New England farmers into traders and molasses was one arm of the triangular trade in manufactured goods, slaves, and molasses. It was a trade that gave distinctive flavor to both American cooking and history. Molasses was eventually overtaken by chocolate. When Dr. James Baker of Dorchester Massachusetts started manufacturing little squares of unsweetened chocolate in the 1760s it was only used as a restorative drink. But by 1906 the first recipes for brownies appeared and after the 1930s when Mrs. Ruth Wakefield stumbled onto chocolate chips at Toll House restaurant, chocolate went on its way to becoming an American addiction.
The Puritan aspect of Indian pudding’s appearance may account for its wane in popularity, but it has also been passed by the technology of home cooking. A long slow cooking in a modern oven is not an economical use of otherwise wasted heat, but an added expense. Accurately measurable oven temperatures, along with reliable chemical leaveners like baking powder and soda made cakes a sure thing for home bakers. Even the advent of the egg-beater, hand turned or electric, turned a chiffon cake from a patissier’s speciality into a homey treat.
My first encounter with Indian pudding was at Boston’s Durgin Park restaurant. I ordered it with no idea what to expect, and its first appearance was daunting. A mound of sludgy brown, even with the ice cream, offered little eye appeal. But by first bite, I was entranced. It was at once chewy and creamy, dark and light, hot and cold; an unintentional Zen of dessert.
In fact, Boston is one of the few places you can find this old-fashioned dessert on restaurant menus, though chefs rarely offer it in its classical form. The recently revived Locke-Ober restaurant offers Indian Pudding tricked out with two tablespoons of white rum (a congenial blend, being a by-product of molasses). Sudbury’s Wayside Inn, made immortal by the poet Longfellow, offers “hot Indian pudding from the bakeshop.”
But Durgin Park’s Indian pudding is the standard. Chef Tom Ryan has been cooking 30 gallons of it three times a week for the past 42 years. He learned the recipe from Helen Goodman who cook for 35 years before him. And it’s as popular as ever, says Ryan. “Regulars order it, and everyone else is curious to try it. You can’t really describe it for them.”
My family makes Indian pudding every year as a Thanksgiving tradition. Or rather, my husband does. When we first met, I tested him at Durgin Park and he passed with flying colors. In fact, he’s the one who insisted on recreating Indian pudding when we moved to Washington.
When it comes to the table dark and fragrant, guests are either put-off or intrigued. Unless they are New England expatriates; then they are delighted. We are always glad to have leftovers though , which make a luxurious breakfast the next morning, even more so, served with a sinful spoonful of vanilla ice cream.
Indian Pudding
from Durgin Park souvenir brochure
as printed circa 1987
An eating house was established in this market warehouse in 1742, and eventually two customers and market men, Eldridge Park and John Durgin became partners. The name hasn’t changed since, and, not much on the menu either. This recipe makes a half gallon and “the secret of its excellence lies in its slow and careful cooking”
Baked Indian Pudding
1 cup yellow granulated cornmeal
1/2 cup black molasses
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup lard or butter
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 1/2 quarts hot milk
Mix all the ingredients thoroughly with one half (3/4 quart) of the hot milk and bake in a very hot oven until it boils. Then stir in the remaining milk and bake in a slow oven for five to seven hours. Bake in a stone crock, well-greased inside.
Set the casserole on a cookie sheet; it is sure to boil over.
Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
from Durgin Park souvenir brochure
as printed circa 1987
An eating house was established in this market warehouse in 1742, and eventually two customers and market men, Eldridge Park and John Durgin became partners. The name hasn’t changed since, and, not much on the menu either. This recipe makes a half gallon and “the secret of its excellence lies in its slow and careful cooking”
Baked Indian Pudding
1 cup yellow granulated cornmeal
1/2 cup black molasses
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup lard or butter
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 1/2 quarts hot milk
Mix all the ingredients thoroughly with one half (3/4 quart) of the hot milk and bake in a very hot oven until it boils. Then stir in the remaining milk and bake in a slow oven for five to seven hours. Bake in a stone crock, well-greased inside.
Set the casserole on a cookie sheet; it is sure to boil over.
Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.