12 Hour Boiled Pudding?? - 220 Year Old Corn Meal Pudding

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.

Channel: Townsends

Views: 236,110

Keywords: 18th century, 18th century cooking, 19th century, history, jas townsend and son, jon townsend, reenacting, townsends

Id: rBopgJrEZqo

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022