Whenever I am reading through a cookbook and I see boil for 12 hours I'm very very intrigued.
Today's recipe has exactly that boil for 12 hours. I was looking for an Indian pudding
recipe because this is the time of year for a classic New England Indian pudding.
There are several different ways to make puddings in the 18th century and sometimes they bake them
but many times they're boiled and we've done multiple boiled pudding recipes on the channel
so sometimes we're going to be boiling like a plum pudding or a hunter's pudding you know rich flour
puddings with suet and they're wonderful puddings this one is boiled for probably two or three four
times longer than a typical boiled pudding. And this isn't huge even a big boiled pudding in the
18th century might only get cooked four or six hours this one calls for 12 hours that's crazy.
I've got a recipe here from 1798 for a 10 pound and that's really big a 10 pound boiled pudding
and it only gets boiled for six hours. Now you're saying Indian pudding what it's an Indian pudding?
Indian pudding is called Indian pudding because it's made with Indian corn. In the 18th century
what we call corn was always called Indian corn because the word corn just means a grain. Could
be any grain whatsoever so if you said give me a corn it might be a corn of weed a corn
of barley and in this case they use the word Indian corn to say oh this special grain that
today we call corn or you might even know it by Maize which kind of differentiates it more. So
I wanted in Indian pudding which is what they always called it until maybe about 1840 when it
might be called corn pudding such a wonderful recipe and so easy that anybody can do it.
The recipe today comes from Amelia Simmons's American cookery 1796 very very important
cookbook for us understanding what cooking is like in North America in the 18th century. There is no
other cookbook like it until 10 and 15 and 20 years later showing up in North America so this
is a sort of a Rosetta Stone cookbook that helps us understand the differences between
English cookery from the 18th century maybe even German cookery where there are influences in here
and what happens when that food comes to North America. There are three Indian pudding recipes
in this cookbook we're going to be using number three and it goes "salt a pint of meal wet with
one quart of milk sweetened put into a strong cloth a brass or Bell metal vessel stone or
earthen pot secure from wet boil for 12 hours. So super simple recipe all of the materials that we
need for this recipe are salt corn meal we need some milk and we need a sweetener. That's it like
four ingredients it's really really simple now she takes a lot of time she says we're going to boil
this and then she gives us like seven different ways to boil it so we can boil it in a cloth we
can boil it in a brass pot of some sort I don't even not sure quite what she's intending here
or a stone or earthenware pot now today we're going to be using an earthenware pot because
as the directions go further it says secure from wet. She doesn't want this to mix with the water
that it's getting boiled in at all and that's very very difficult to do if you're boiling in
a cloth so many of these recipes are boiling in a cloth I thought we would boil in the pot to
try it in a slightly different way. This reminds me of something like a jugged hare recipe there
are some recipes where we do this where we cook inside of a pot that's being boiled all
the time. Why are we not baking this? Because some of the recipes are baked well what happens
if you don't have an oven and she's dealing with people that are in all sorts of economic
circumstances maybe you don't have an oven at home and that is very true for many people so
something where we get to cook this by boiling it well everybody's got a pot to boil something in.
We've got our dry ingredients already mixed up here and now the important part here is
is the ratio of cornmeal to milk we want one part cornmeal to two part
milk by volume and we've got our one part of cornmeal in here I need two cupfuls and this
is like two cups here two cup fulls of our milk and we're going to add those to this.
And it says sweetened to taste or sweeten it as you please. Many of the recipes as we go into
the 19th century further on use molasses it's a very inexpensive sweetener of the time period.
I'm going to use another quintessential sweetener of New England and that is maple syrup.
So sweetened to taste to me means it needs to be kind of sweet on our maple syrup I'm using
about a cup in this recipe. Like several of the recipes in this cookbook if you look at
this you say this will never work I know I did I did a uh a pumpkin pie recipe out of the same
cookbook and and it made this just just totally liquid interior and I'm thinking this will never
set up it'll never turn into a pumpkin pie it turned out perfect so I'm gonna take her at her
word and say yes this sloppy mess will make a wonderful Indian pudding all we have to do now
is transfer this into our cooking pot one last step is to seal this pot up because I could just
put the lid on and then set this in our boiling pot of water but it says to be really careful
that it doesn't get wet inside so I'm going to do a couple of extra precautions I've made this kind
of a sealing dough to go in the top level of this as this is something that they would do for the
mouths of ovens if you want the door stopped up really tight to keep the steam in which is
exactly what we want here you would make a real quick you know inexpensive just you know you're
not going to eat it it's just a seal up the surface a little bit of dough so I just took a
little bit of flour tiny bit of salt in there and some water and we made this little dough mixture.
Okay and there there has got to be a mistake it does not turn out like this this is not Indian
pudding and I'm it's like basically uncooked down there. This thing cooked for 12 hours so
um something's completely wrong with the way the recipe is or the way I read it so let's dig in
let's look at that recipe real quick. Sometimes I get a little over excited and I get working on a
recipe and and I need to dig a little bit further so I started digging on this and I found not
not just one problem but two problems with this particular recipe and all we really need to do is
is super dig in on these other ones. Now because I have done one of these other recipes earlier and
it worked out I thought you know it shouldn't be a problem right um number one there's there are
errors on the back side of the uh on the back page of the cookbook errors where the author she says
um I didn't know how to lay out this cookbook so I gave the project to somebody else and they they
purposely messed up some of my recipes. Anyway it says here um that for Indian pudding number
three you only boil it six hours well we know that over boiling it isn't the problem of this
particular part because the bottom just isn't like cooked so we know that's not the problem
so if we look at recipe number one it says and it doesn't read perfectly but it says
stir together while hot stir together the cornmeal and the uh the milk while it's hot
well we didn't do that it doesn't say that in number three and number two is even less
um easy to understand "three pints of scalded milk to one pint of salted meal and then let it cool"
again they're implying that it's hot you stir those together hot maybe even kind of cook them
together a little bit and we didn't do anything like that so I think that's the real problem here
is that the cornmeal needs to be cooked and mixed with that hot milk so that it absorbs
some of that moisture before we start to cook it into our pudding so we're gonna have to try again.
Our second try out of the water bath and it we only cooked it six hours this time so it looks
much better we opened this up and obviously it stayed almost exactly the same way as it
went in which is probably good so let's find out just what it ended up tasting like now the
one before you you could we couldn't even serve it like this it was just so hard and
dense and it just didn't have any flavor to it at all except for just raw cornmeal basically.
And this has a much nicer texture now this is pretty cold it's been outside so it's got a
really you know nice firm texture maybe if it was inside have just a slight bit more flavor
but I don't think this is meant to be eaten hot although I think you could eat it hot with
without any problem but usually I think they let this cool down to room temperature and just serve
it up as a as a dessert it's a pudding um and it's got a wonderful flavor sometimes uh they
put fruit in this one this recipe did not have any fruit but you could almost kind of imply
from sweetened to your taste that um putting raisins in or currants or even cranberries
were something that they might do in this recipe uh under the under the you know the the whole
of course sort of category of sweeten and uh this has a that just that hint of you know maple flavor
because we used maple syrup it doesn't have a darker color if we would have used molasses
it would have sort of a browner color which sometimes you see with a an Indian pudding.
Well this certainly has been a learning lesson in what we see as a recipe sometimes just a couple
lines super simple and in fact that makes it much more difficult to interpret and to understand
unless we dig into the whole cookbook in this particular circumstance. We had to you know pay
attention to the errors on the back page look at all the other recipes and use them all combined
together to understand what this particular recipe is and if it's a historical recipe like this one
sometimes we even have to go outside of this particular cookbook and say okay what does it
say in another cookbook because sometimes each recipe is missing something that the other one
has so that we can truly understand what this dish is supposed to be like. And you know it
helps us if we know what the modern version is too we can get an idea about what was the earlier one
completely different or are we just not doing it right when we're looking at the historical recipe.
I guess the real question is what we achieved with the second part of the cooking. So you know
we put the cornmeal in the in the warm milk and it's started to thicken up and because the way
we prepared this we kind of cooked it up just a little bit more so that it thickened then we
put it in here and tasting the mixture before we put it in here and then after the six hour boil
what was the real big difference I guess? that's you know a question from from your side it's
like what was a real big difference? and it's really hard to say with this particular dish
that we did this particular time it doesn't seem like there's a massive difference in
um the the texture but I do think it possibly took the edge off of some of the corn flavor
that some people might not like or maybe change the texture so that it didn't have sort of hard
bits in it but it's tough to say that this one changed a whole lot was it worth boiling it for
six hours? I'm just not sure so I've made a much more successful Indian puddings in the past this
one has been a bit of an experiment on just how this particular version of the recipe worked
out and I think what's really missing here is the little sweet components and the change in
texture that you get from raisins or currants or cranberries or even chunks of apples some of the
some of the recipes mentioned that I think it's really missing in here if I was going
to change it I'd definitely put something in like that I think it would be much much better.