Monday, November 24, 2008

Indian Pudding

I'm sad that I can't find my recipe for Indian Pudding. About a decade ago I was ADD-ing about Thanksgiving and I found all this information about how early colonists wouldn't have had sugar because that was sent to England for profit. Instead, they used molasses, the by-product of sugar production that was sent by ship up the Atlantic Coast. The website of all of that information offered a recipe of Indian Pudding, a favorite of early colonists. That's all I remember of my long-ago research, except that I had also found a lot of Thanksgiving jokes which I sent to my nephews. Since then, Indian Pudding has been one of my favorite dishes to prepare for Thanksgiving. Now I can't find that document anywhere in my computer. The victim of a crash, I suppose; and my hard copy is nowhere to be found on my shelf of cookbooks and collected recipes. The best I can do for this year will have to be to try this recipe. There's something very nostalgic and sentimental in preparing Indian Pudding as part of our Thanksgiving. My recipe didn't use a double boiler and required the cornmeal to be added to the milk a couple of tablespoons at a time. I had to stir constantly to keep the milk from creating a film on the bottom of the pot and eventually burning. All I needed was an open kitchen fire of coals with a cast iron pot over it to feel in the colonial moment.

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