By Joyce Rosencrans
The Cincinnati Post Pudding got no respect in the 1970s and '80s, given its association with nursery food and sick food. No, cooks taken with the word "gourmet" in those days had to be serving mousse, not a homespun pudding, or a souffle, which is simply baked pudding fluffed up with beaten egg whites.
Then there's the negative historical connection to British-revered "puds" steamed in pudding basins with treacle or some other sticky substance that once held the empire together.
Some English puddings of our colonial culinary heritage bear these quaint names: spotted dog (suet pudding steamed with currants), plum pudding (even Tiny Tim would know that "plums" are really raisins) and thunder-and-lightning (rice pudding served with scalded milk and golden syrup). Delicious they don't sound, given all that suet instead of butter.
But pudding is back big-time on the American scene as comfort food, diner food and as a way to consume more calcium for strong bones.
Slide a spoon into the cool depths of a home-cooked butterscotch, chocolate or banana pudding, preferably cradled in a glass sundae dish with a scalloped edge. It's silky smoothness and true dairy flavor transport you right back to sanity and tranquility after a hard day.
Many American kids know only "instant" pudding, and that's too bad. The texture and flavor of any box mix is inferior to an old-fashioned, home-cooked cornstarch pudding. The good news is that even the youngest can stir up a batch of box-mix pudding for themselves, and this means more milk consumed with bone-building calcium.
Puddings can be further calcium-boosted with the addition of dry milk powder or even small-curd cottage cheese. The tiny lumps of cottage cheese make an instant pudding seem more substantial and it resembles tapioca. Lumps can be good!
But when there's time, take out a saucepan and stir together brown sugar and cornstarch for a real butterscotch pudding like great-grandma would have made with a fresh egg or two (probably gathered from the henhouse) and milk (probably from Bossie). Those are the obvious reasons why puddings in all their variations and forms (stirred, baked) were a staple family dessert for agricultural America. Cows and chickens were kept by most hungry families; puddings helped use up the byproducts.
An Early American pudding that included cornmeal is "Indian" pudding, made famous by New England settlers. With cornmeal as the thickener instead of cornstarch, molasses as the sweetening, it was baked slowly in a crock for three hours. And though it hardly fits into a modern cook's daily schedule, Indian pudding has long been a menu favorite at Boston's famous Durgin Park restaurant near Faneuil Hall. Its forerunner was hasty pudding, better known as cornmeal mush, served hot or cooled, sliced, then fried.
The word Indian refers to Indian meal or cornmeal, according to the late Richard Sax's excellent recipe and food-history book, Classic Home Desserts (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). It doesn't mean that colonists borrowed the recipe from Native Americans. Indian pudding is more in the British tradition of a steamed pudding.
Sax wrote that "rice and bread puddings, and other puddings based on noodles, starches and grains, collectively form one of the twin pillars that hold up the entire edifice of old-fashioned desserts. The other is the family of warm fruit desserts: cobblers, crisps and brown Bettys."
The recipes here have more modern appeal, including an instant-pudding pie. Or go chocolate with fudge pudding.
(Joyce Rosencrans is food editor at The Cincinnati Post.)
Recipes:
Baked Fudge Pudding
Butterscotch Pudding
Instant Banana Pudding Pie
