Hasty pudding
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Hasty pudding is a pudding or porridge grain cooked in milk or water; Indian pudding is an American variant made with maize.
Since the 16th century at least, hasty pudding has been a British dish of wheat flour cooked in boiling milk or water until it reaches the consistency of a thick batter. In some regions, it refers to an oatmeal porridge.[1] In the United States, it invariably refers to a version made of ground maize or corn.
Hasty pudding was used as a term for an oatmeal porridge in England when Hannah Glasse wrote her 18th-century book The Art of Cookery.
The North American version, also known as corn mush or Indian mush, in its simplest form is corn meal cooked slowly in water until it thickens. It may be eaten hot, or left to cool and solidify. Slices of the cold pudding may then be fried. Hasty pudding was once a popular American food because of its low cost, long shelf life, and versatility, and was eaten with both sweet and savory accompaniments, such as maple syrup, molasses, or salted meat. Count Rumford, an American inventor who disapproved of the Revolution and went to live in Europe, still liked his hasty pudding, hot, in a bowl of milk.
Eliza Leslie, the influential American cookbook author of the early 19th century, includes a recipe for flour hasty pudding in her 1840 Directions for Cookery, In Its Various Branches, and calls the corn type Indian mush (she calls an oatmeal version burgoo). She stresses the need for slow cooking rather than haste, and also recommends the use of a special mush-stick for stirring to prevent lumps.
This mush-stick is perhaps related to the pudding stick of the nursery rhyme beating.
Hasty pudding, itself, is memorialized in a verse of the early American song Yankee Doodle:
- Fath'r and I went down to camp
- Along with Captain Goodin',
- And there we saw the men and boys
- As thick as hasty puddin'
("Goodin" is a New England pronunciation of Goodwin).
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[edit] Indian pudding
Indian pudding is a more elaborate form of hasty pudding. It consists of milk, cornmeal, and molasses,( or, alternatively, maple syrup and honey, and sometimes sugar), spices (nearly always including cinnamon and ground ginger), butter, and usually raisins and nuts, baked in a slow oven for several hours. It is a traditional New England dessert, usually served with vanilla ice cream or hard sauce.
[edit] Polenta and mămăligă
Polenta is the Italian version of hasty pudding, with corn substituted for the wheat originally used by the Romans. Mămăligă is the Romanian version, also made with corn.
[edit] References
- Evan Jones, American Food: The Gastronomic Story (1981) Viking Books ISBN 0-394-74646-5
- Jonathan Norton Leonard, American Cooking: New England (1970) Time-Life Books
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. hasty pudding
