Tomorrow, Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club will be giving away its annual Woman of the Year award, a festive if arbitrary title with mysterious criteria usually bestowed on a popular contemporary actress. Past winners of the award, now in its 60th year, include Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine, Cher and Drew Barrymore. This year, actress Julianne Moore will accept the trophya bronze pudding pot.
Even though what Moore really wants is an Oscar, this is very nice for her. But it raises the obvious question: What is hasty pudding, anyway?
A phone call to my grandmother revealed the answer, or at least one that I was willing to accept (she can be very convincing). Gram grew up with something called “Indian Pudding,” but she says some folks in her rural Maine town called it “Hasty Pudding.”
It’s also misnamed, she said. It takes forever to make it.
Ah yes. Indian Pudding. I knew what that was: a milky, baked cornmeal pudding, like this one, adapted from “The Joy of Cooking” (1975 edition).
Indian Pudding
Adapted from “The Joy of Cooking.” Makes 8-10 servings.
Ingredients
4 cups milk
1/3 cup cornmeal
3/4 cup dark molasses
1/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ginger
3 tablespoons sugar
1 well-beaten egg
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Directions
Preheat oven to 300. Using the top half of a double boiler, bring milk barely to a boil over direct, medium heat. Stir in cornmeal. Using both parts of the double boiler, cook the milk and cornmeal over boiling water for 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in molasses, and cook 5 minutes more. Remove from heat, add butter, salt, ginger, sugar and (slowly, stirring so it doesn’t scramble) the beaten egg. Blend completely, then stir in raisins and cinnamon. Pour into well-greased baking dish (about 8 by 8 inches), and bake for 1 1/2 hours. (To achieve a soft center, pour 1 cup cold milk over pudding after 1 hour of baking, and continue to bake another 2 hours, for a total of 3 hours). Serve hot with vanilla ice cream.
I made it the other day, while I was waiting for a repairman (this is the perfect thing to make when waiting for a repairman because it has to bake for hours. Gram was right: This pudding is anything but hasty).
It was pretty good, a humble kind of hybrid of pudding and cake, a sort of soft-but-solid polenta that called to mind the filling of a custard cake, only without all those eggs and a slightly more substantial texture. Sweet, rustic and only a little bit wobbly. (Generally, I can’t bear the wobble, but I didn’t mind this because it exhibited only a modest wobble.)
The flavor, however, was dull: Milky, with only a vague hint of cornmeal-ness at the end. The ginger and cinnamon were only ho-hum. And, it was not a pretty thing to look at — just a dish of goop. No doubt, this pudding needed an update.
The question was, what?
First, I resolved to get rid of the raisins. Raisins in pudding? Yuck. Surely chocolate chips would be better.
So, in went chocolate chips. Nope, too goofy, and chocolate chips, which love to bake for 12 minutes in a cookie, don’t love to be in the oven for 2 hours. They separate into chocolate and oil, leaving oily little pockets of chocolate throughout the pudding. And chocolate and molasses aren’t the happiest of bedfellows.
Diced apples leeched too much liquid, and the pudding came out more like a sauce.
And then, it occurred to me. Why branch outward, adding alien ingredients, when instead I could branch inward, strengthening some of the flavors that already informed this pudding?
Doubling up on the cinnamon and ginger helped, but there was a clunkiness to the flavor, as if it had been taped onto the pudding rather than infused into it. What’s more, the molasses was clobbering them.
If I could find a way to add the spices earlier, and ease up the molasses-assault, perhaps I’d have something.
I decided to spice up the milk from the start, giving it a chance to infuse the milk early. I’d banish the molasses in favor of milder sweetenings, maple syrup and corn syrup. I’d drop the double boiler, originally called for to prevent burning the milk, in favor of attentive stirring. I’d increase the cornmeal to reduce the wobble. And to make it prettier, I’d sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar on top and give it a last-minute broil.
Not-So-Hasty Pudding
The fresher your ground spices are, the better this will taste. Serves 8-10.
Ingredients
4 cups whole milk
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup light corn syrup
1/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 well-beaten egg
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Directions
Preheat oven to 300. In a medium saucepan, stir milk together with spices and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat. Watch it very carefully, as it will boil over in an instant. Slowly sprinkle cornmeal over the milk, stirring gently as you add it. Cook, stirring constantly, 15 minutes until milk begins to thicken. Stir in syrups, and cook 5 minutes more. Remove from heat, and stir in butter, salt, sugar, vanilla and (carefully, in a slow stream and stirring constantly so it doesn’t scramble) the beaten egg. Blend completely. Pour into well-greased baking dish (about 8 by 8), and bake for 1 1/2 hours. Remove from oven, and preheat broiler to hot. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons brown sugar over the top, then place under the broiler on high 5 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.
Victory, sort of. Better than the original recipe anyway. I’m not sure I’d make this every day, or even every month. Because all things being equal, I’d probably rather have a piece of cake.
But this pudding, steeped in history and syrup, is worth trying once. Why not tomorrow, in honor of Julianne Moore?
Tucker Shaw: 303-954-1958, tshaw@denverpost.com.
