The regional table / New Hampshire

Indian Pudding

Published September 23, 2026 · New Hampshire

A deep brown baked pudding in a buttered earthenware dish, a spoonful lifted out to show its soft set, with a jug of cold cream beside it — It should wobble, not slice. A pudding you can cut into neat squares was baked too long or made too stiff. AI-generated illustration.

Three hours in a slow oven for a quart of milk, a cup of cornmeal and a teacup of molasses. Nothing about this dish has ever been in a hurry.

Indian pudding is genuinely old, and the books prove it. It is in the first cookbook written by an American, Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796, under the heading "A Nice Indian Pudding", and she gives three of them. No. 1: three pints of scalded milk, seven spoons of fine Indian meal stirred in while hot, left to stand till cooled, then seven eggs, half a pound of raisins, four ounces of butter, spice and sugar, baked an hour and a half. No. 2: three pints of scalded milk to a pint of salted meal, cooled, with two eggs, four ounces of butter, "sugar or molasses and spice" to taste, two and a half hours in the oven. No. 3 has no eggs and no oven at all — salt a pint of meal, wet it with a quart of milk, sweeten it, tie it in a strong cloth or seal it in a brass or bell-metal vessel or a stone pot, keep the water out and boil it twelve hours — and the errata page at the back of the book corrects even that: "A nice Indian pudding, No. 3; boil only 6 hours." One thing worth saying, because it is usually said the other way round: molasses is not what makes this pudding in 1796. It appears once, as an alternative to sugar, in one receipt out of three.

The pudding people actually mean today — dark, spiced, molasses through and through — is a generation younger and it is just as well documented. Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife of 1832 prints a baked Indian pudding of a quart of scalded milk, "(skimmed milk will do,)" seven table spoonfuls of sifted Indian meal, a teaspoonful of salt, a teacupful of molasses and a great spoonful of ginger or sifted cinnamon, baked three or four hours, with a line that solves a problem most modern recipes do not even mention: "If you want whey, you must be sure and pour in a little cold milk, after it is all mixed." Sarah Josepha Hale's The Good Housekeeper of 1839 gives the same dish as Plain Baked Indian Pudding — half a pint of sifted meal and a teacup of molasses to a quart of scalded skimmed milk, salt and ginger or cinnamon, left to stand an hour or two, baked three or four hours in a buttered earthen pot, with half a teacup of cold milk poured in and stirred through as it goes into the oven. The Indian in the name is the grain, not the dish: Indian meal is cornmeal, and maize and the cooking of it were Native American before any of these books existed. That the pudding belonged to a New Hampshire winter needs no cookbook at all — the New Hampshire Sentinel of Keene printed a set of verses on 19 December 1818 in which a writer measures the south's watermelons, terrapin stews and soft crabs against his own country and picks "the dark Indian pudding" and a pot of baked beans.

Why this version works

A slow oven, and a long one. Three or four hours is what both 1830s books say, and they are cooking in a cooling brick oven. At 300°F a quart of milk thickened with a cup of meal has time to set without the edges breaking into curds, and the long heat is what turns the molasses from sharp to deep. A hot oven gets you a scrambled skin over a thin middle.

Molasses, not sugar, carries it. Sweetness is the least of what molasses does here. It brings acid, which sets the milk a little; bitterness, which keeps the dish from tasting like dessert custard; and the colour the 1818 verse was talking about. Use unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is a different and much harsher thing and it will take the pudding over completely.

The meal is cooked before it is baked. Cornmeal takes a long time to soften and it will not do it properly suspended in a cold oven dish. Simmons stirs hers into scalded milk and lets it stand till cool; Hale scalds the milk and then lets the mixture stand an hour or two. Twenty minutes of stirring over low heat does the same work faster and is the single thing that separates a smooth pudding from a gritty one.

The cold milk is a technique, not a garnish. Pour a cup of cold milk over the pudding before it goes into the oven and it stays a little apart from the rest through the baking, leaving a soft, almost liquid layer under the crust. Child calls it whey and says to pour it in if you want it; Hale stirs hers through. Either is correct, and doing nothing at all gives you a firmer, plainer pudding, which is also correct.

Ingredient notes

Milk: a quart of whole milk, three cups cooked with the meal and one cup held back cold. Child says skimmed milk will do, and it does — the pudding is leaner and slightly grainier. Do not substitute cream for any of it; the fat stops the meal from setting.

Spice: a teaspoon of ground ginger is the 1832 and 1839 measure, "a great spoonful", and ginger is the dominant note in both. Cinnamon instead is explicitly allowed in both books. Add the nutmeg if you like it, but keep one of them in charge rather than making a spice blend.

Cornmeal: half a cup of stone-ground yellow cornmeal, medium grind. Fine degerminated supermarket meal makes a smoother, blander pudding; coarse polenta never fully softens in three hours. Both 1830s recipes say sifted Indian meal, which in a modern kitchen means sifting out the coarsest fragments if your meal is very rough.

Molasses: half a cup of unsulphured molasses, a shade more than the old teacupful. Not blackstrap, not treacle, and not sorghum, which is thinner and sourer and belongs to another part of the country.

Step by step

Heat the oven and butter the dish. Heat the oven to 300°F. Butter a 2-quart baking dish generously, earthenware or a deep glass dish for preference, and set it in a larger roasting pan.
Scald the milk. Bring 3 cups of the milk to a scald in a heavy saucepan — steaming, with bubbles at the rim, not boiling — over medium heat.
Cook the meal in it. Whisk in the cornmeal in a thin stream and keep whisking. Lower the heat and cook 15 to 20 minutes, stirring often and reaching into the corners, until the mixture is the thickness of pourable porridge and no longer tastes raw.
Sweeten and spice, off the heat. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the molasses, butter, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt until the butter has melted and the colour is even and dark.
Pour, then float the cold milk. Pour into the buttered dish. Pour the remaining 1 cup of cold milk gently over the surface, over the back of a spoon, and do not stir it in. Pour boiling water into the roasting pan to come an inch up the side of the dish.

Float the cold milk over the pudding without stirring it in. AI-generated illustration.
Bake long and slow. Bake 2½ to 3 hours, until the edges are set and risen slightly and the centre still moves as a mass when you nudge it. It will look underdone; it is not.
Rest before serving. Let it stand 30 minutes out of the oven. Serve warm, in spoonfuls, with cold heavy cream poured over or a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Gritty pudding means the meal never softened: it was stirred into milk that was not hot enough, or it went to the oven after five minutes on the stove instead of twenty. Once it is baked, the grit will not go, but the pudding is perfectly good warmed through with a splash of milk stirred in and served as a porridge rather than a pudding. If instead the middle is still soup at three hours, it was a wide shallow dish or an oven running cold — give it another thirty minutes and check again, and remember that this pudding sets further as it cools.

Storage and make-ahead

It keeps 4 days refrigerated, covered, and is a New England breakfast as much as a dessert. Reheat single portions in a low oven or a covered pan with a spoonful of milk; the microwave makes the molasses taste flat and burnt at the edges.

It freezes better than most milk puddings because the cornmeal holds it together. Freeze it in the dish, well wrapped, up to 2 months, and reheat it covered at 300°F for about 45 minutes from frozen.

What to serve with it

Cold cream over hot pudding is the whole of the traditional service and the contrast is the point. Vanilla ice cream does the same job. If it is on the table after a heavy dinner, keep the portions to a large spoonful each — this is dense, and the molasses accumulates.

From the recipe box / New Hampshire

Indian Pudding

Cornmeal cooked into scalded milk, sweetened with molasses and ginger, and left in a slow oven for three hours until it sets dark and soft.

Prep: 30 min
Cook: 3 hr
Total: 3 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 205 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

4 cups whole milk, divided
½ cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal, medium grind
½ cup unsulphured molasses
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for the dish
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
Cold heavy cream or vanilla ice cream, for serving

Instructions

Heat the oven to 300°F, butter a 2-quart dish and stand it in a roasting pan.
Scald 3 cups of the milk in a heavy saucepan.
Whisk in the cornmeal and cook 15–20 minutes over low heat, stirring often, until thick and no longer raw.
Off the heat, stir in the molasses, butter, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt.
Pour into the dish, float the remaining 1 cup cold milk over the top without stirring, and pour boiling water into the pan to come 1 inch up the side.
Bake 2½–3 hours, until set at the edges and still loose in the centre.
Rest 30 minutes and serve warm with cold cream or vanilla ice cream.

Nutrition

Fat	8 g (5 g saturated)
Sodium	195 mg
Protein	5 g
Serving	About ⅔ cup, without cream
Calories	205
Cholesterol	24 mg
Carbohydrates	29 g (21 g sugar, 1 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Why is mine bitter?

Almost certainly blackstrap molasses, which is the by-product left after the sugar has been taken out twice and is far harsher than the cooking molasses these recipes assume. The other possibility is too hot an oven: molasses scorches at the edges of the dish long before the centre sets, which is the argument for 300°F and a water bath.

What is Indian meal?

Cornmeal. In these books Indian means the grain — maize, a Native American crop the English settlers in New England adopted along with the ways of cooking it — as against wheat or rye flour, which is why the same books also print rye and Indian bread. Nothing in the name refers to India.

Should there be eggs in it?

There are seven in Simmons's first receipt of 1796 and two in her second, and none at all in Child's or Hale's. Without eggs the pudding sets on cornmeal starch alone, which is what gives it that loose, almost pourable middle. Add two beaten eggs with the molasses if you want something closer to a custard — it will set firmer and slice, and it will be a different and older dish.

Can I make it in a slow cooker?

Yes, and it suits the dish. Cook the meal into the milk on the stove as written, scrape it into a buttered slow-cooker insert, float the cold milk on top and cook on low for 4 to 5 hours. You lose the baked skin, which is a real loss, and you gain the ability to ignore it entirely.