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The regional table / Indiana

Persimmon Pudding

Published September 22, 2026 · Indiana

Dark baked persimmon pudding cut into squares in a rectangular metal pan, with whipped cream on one square.
It rises in the oven and falls as it cools. A pudding that stayed puffed was underbaked or overfloured. AI-generated illustration.
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The fruit this is made of is genuinely inedible until it has gone soft enough that most people would throw it away, and no amount of frost will hurry that along.

The United States Department of Agriculture went out of its way to kill the frost story more than a century ago. Farmers' Bulletin 685, "The Native Persimmon", written by W. F. Fletcher of the Bureau of Plant Industry and issued on 12 October 1915, lists the reasons the tree had been neglected and puts this first: "One reason for the neglect of this fruit seems to be the erroneous yet oft-repeated statement that persimmons are unfit to eat until they have either been touched by frost or frozen." Then it explains what is really going on. "The truth of the matter is that freezing is as detrimental to the quality of persimmons as to the quality of any other fruit. If persimmons are not edible and free from astringency before frost, it is because the variety is a late one and the fruit has not yet matured." The bulletin quotes John Smith on the unripe fruit drawing a man's mouth awry with much torment and says the line "so well characterizes the puckering, astringent effect of the tannin contained in the immature fruit that no other comment is necessary." Ripeness, not cold, is the whole test, and ripe means soft to the point of collapse.

The same bulletin is quietly an Indiana document. Of the varieties it describes, five are Indiana introductions: Early Bearing and Ruby from Cartersburg, Golden Gem from Borden, Hicks from Washington County and Shoto from Danville, all in the southern half of the state where this pudding belongs. And its recipe headed "Persimmon Pudding (cake or pone)" — a pint of fine persimmon pulp, three cups of flour, a cup of sugar, a quart of sweet milk, a teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder — carries a footnote crediting Indiana Experiment Station Bulletin 60, which is to say Purdue's. Bulletin 685 also gives the one piece of technique nobody guesses: "Since heat makes the astringency of the persimmon more apparent, it is always well to add one-half teaspoonful of baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) to each cupful of persimmon pulp in all recipes where the fruit is subjected to heat." The dish is not only Indiana's — the native persimmon grows across half the country, and the oldest dated recipe reachable here ran in the Atlanta Constitution of 10 December 1900, a reader sending in half a gallon of "good persimmons (not those that are puckery)" scalded, mashed, strained through a colander, mixed with a quart of sweet milk, four eggs and a cup of sugar, and baked two hours. But the Indiana record is thin for a reason worth printing: The Princeton Cook Book of 1909, from Gibson County in the state's own persimmon country, contains the word persimmon exactly zero times. Wild fruit that everyone gathers is the last thing anybody writes down.

Why this version works

It is supposed to fall. The batter is mostly fruit purée and milk with just enough flour to hold it, so it puffs on the baking powder and sinks as the steam leaves. The sunken, dense, slightly chewy middle is the finished texture, not a failure. Judge it by the edges pulling away and a skewer coming out with damp crumbs.

A shallow pan, not a basin. This is called a pudding but it is baked flat and thin, about an inch deep, so a lot of surface caramelises against the buttered pan while the middle stays wet. Bake the same batter in a deep dish and you get a heavy, uniform, faintly gluey cake with none of the edges anyone actually fights over.

Ripeness is the only variable that matters. Tannin in an immature persimmon binds to the proteins in your mouth and that is the pucker. It does not cook out and it does not freeze out; it disappears as the fruit matures. A persimmon ready for this pudding is wrinkled, translucent, and so soft it collapses when you pick it up — the condition at which a supermarket would have thrown it out a week earlier.

The soda is doing chemistry, not leavening. Bulletin 685's half teaspoonful per cup of pulp is there because heat makes any residual astringency more noticeable, and the alkali counters it. It also darkens the pudding, which is why a proper one is nearly black rather than orange. Use it even with fruit you are sure of; the cost of being wrong is an inedible pan.

Ingredient notes

Milk: two cups of whole milk, or buttermilk if you have it, in which case cut the baking powder to one teaspoon since the soda has an acid to work on. Buttermilk gives a sharper, less flat-tasting pudding.

Spice: cinnamon is what the 1915 bulletin uses and it is all this needs; a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg alongside is traditional in the Indiana versions. Keep it restrained — persimmon is a delicate flavour and heavy spicing turns the pan into gingerbread.

Sugar: a cup and a half, which is less than most Indiana recipes and enough. Persimmon pulp is already sweet and the sugar is here mostly for the browning at the edges. If your fruit is very ripe, take it down to a cup and a quarter.

Persimmon pulp: two cups, from the native American persimmon if you can get it — southern Indiana sells it frozen in pint tubs through the autumn. Work the fruit through a food mill or a colander to leave the skins and the big flat seeds behind. Japanese Hachiya persimmons will do it, taken when they are jelly-soft and nothing less; the flat Fuyu kind never develops the same flavour and should not be used.

Step by step

  1. Pulp the fruit. Work very ripe persimmons through a food mill or press them through a colander with the back of a ladle until you have 2 cups of smooth pulp. Discard skins and seeds. Taste it: it should be sweet with no trace of grip at the back of the tongue. If it grips, the fruit is not ready and nothing in this recipe will fix that.
  2. Set the oven and the pan. Heat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9x13-inch pan generously, corners included — the sugar at the edges will want to stick.
  3. Mix the wet. Whisk the pulp with the sugar, the eggs, the milk, the melted butter and the vanilla until smooth. Whisk in the baking soda and let it stand 2 minutes; the mixture will darken and loosen.
  4. Add the dry. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg together in a second bowl, then stir them into the wet in two goes, just until no dry flour remains. The batter is thin, roughly the consistency of a crêpe batter, and it is supposed to be.
  5. Bake. Pour into the pan and bake 50 to 60 minutes. It will rise, darken, and crack at the edges. It is done when the sides have pulled away, the centre no longer ripples when you shake the pan, and a skewer in the middle comes out with moist crumbs rather than batter.
    A wooden skewer bearing moist crumbs above a dark baked persimmon pudding with edges pulled away from the pan.
    Look for edges pulling away and moist crumbs on the skewer, rather than liquid batter. AI-generated illustration.
  6. Cool and cut. Cool in the pan on a rack at least an hour. It will sink by half an inch. Cut into twelve squares and serve warm or at room temperature with unsweetened whipped cream.
If the finished pudding tastes furry and dries your mouth, the fruit was underripe and there is no rescue — taste the pulp before it goes anywhere near the pan. If it came out rubbery and tall, there was too much flour or it was over-mixed; measure the flour by spooning it into the cup rather than scooping. If the middle stayed liquid while the edges burnt, the pan was too small and the batter too deep, so the outside finished first.

Storage and make-ahead

Covered in its pan, it keeps 4 days in the fridge and is arguably better on day two, when the texture has tightened and the flavour has settled. Warm squares 15 seconds in the microwave or 8 minutes in a 325°F oven.

It freezes well, wrapped in squares, for 3 months. Persimmon pulp itself freezes even better and that is how most Indiana households hold it — pint tubs pulped in October and baked from in January.

What to serve with it

Unsweetened whipped cream, and a lot of it. The pudding is sweet and dense and needs something cold and plain against it; sweetened cream makes the whole plate cloying.

A hard sauce with bourbon in it is the other Indiana answer, and vanilla ice cream is the easy one.

Dark baked persimmon pudding cut into squares in a rectangular metal pan, with whipped cream on one square.

From the recipe box / Indiana

Persimmon Pudding

Pulp from the native persimmon, taken when the fruit is soft enough to look spoiled, baked flat in a pan with sugar, flour and milk until it sets dark and sinks in the middle.

Prep
30 min
Cook
55 min
Total
1 hr 25 min, plus cooling
Serves
12
Calories
235 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Press very ripe persimmons through a food mill or colander to get 2 cups of seedless pulp, and taste it for astringency.
  2. Heat the oven to 350°F and butter a 9x13-inch pan.
  3. Whisk the pulp with the sugar, eggs, milk, melted butter and vanilla, then whisk in the baking soda and stand 2 minutes.
  4. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg together and stir into the wet in two additions.
  5. Pour into the pan and bake 50–60 minutes, until the sides pull away and a skewer comes out with moist crumbs.
  6. Cool in the pan at least an hour, cut into 12 squares and serve with unsweetened whipped cream.

Nutrition

Fat6 g (3 g saturated)
Sodium240 mg
Protein3 g
Serving1 square, one-twelfth of a 9x13 pan
Calories235
Cholesterol45 mg
Carbohydrates41 g (31 g sugar, 2 g fiber)

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

Questions readers ask

Do I have to wait for a frost?

No, and the federal bulletin that says so is 111 years old. Farmers' Bulletin 685 of 1915 calls the frost rule erroneous and oft-repeated, and notes that in persimmon country many of the best fruits are lost every year because they ripen and fall before frost and nobody believes they are ready. Freezing is as bad for a persimmon as it is for any other fruit. Wait for softness instead.

Mine sank in the middle. Is that wrong?

That is right. It rises on the baking powder while the steam is in it and settles as it cools into the dense, damp slab the dish is supposed to be. What would be wrong is a wet ripple under the crust when you shake the pan at the end of baking, which means it needs another ten minutes.

Can I use the flat supermarket persimmons?

Not for this. Fuyu persimmons are bred to be eaten firm and have neither the flavour nor the texture the pudding is built on. Hachiya persimmons work if you let them go until they are translucent and sloshing, which takes a week or more on a counter. The native American persimmon is smaller, seedier and better, and in southern Indiana it is sold as frozen pulp precisely because pulping it is the tedious part.

Why does the recipe call for baking soda as well as baking powder?

They are doing two different jobs. The powder lifts the batter. The soda is the 1915 bulletin's instruction — half a teaspoonful for each cupful of pulp in anything cooked — because heat sharpens whatever astringency the fruit still carries and the alkali blunts it. The soda is also what makes the pudding go dark.