Desserts
Indian Pudding | History of a Classic New England Dessert
Indian Pudding is a traditional New England recipe that embodies the flavors of fall. Learn more about Indian Pudding history, plus a recipe.
By Aimee Tucker|Apr 25 2022|
Coffee By Design | Portland, Maine
Photo Credit : Katherine KeenanYield:
Ingredients
Instructions
Confession: I’ve never had Indian Pudding. I guess it’s because I grew up in the Midwest or something…
Hi Jen! You get a pass for that one (we can’t all grow up in New England…) but you should definitely try it sometime. I know how much you love pumpkin, and the flavors and spices are similar.
A nice addition would be a cup of pre-soaked golden raisins.
I made it today…My Dad use to eat it all the time at Durgin Park Restaurant in Boston…so its a dessert surprise for him today.
Ah — Indian pudding at Durgin-Park. Shortly after we were married, my wife and I took her parents, who were not from New England, for a traditional dinner at Durgin-Park. After a great meal, when we were ordering desert, I said to the waitress, “I’ll have the Indian pudding — that’s what I always come here for!” And, in true Durgin-Park style, she replied, “Then why did you eat all that other stuff?”
I grew up in New England, eating Indian Pudding; although I confess it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I really appreciated it! I remember warm Indian Pudding with Ginger Ice Cream from Newport Creamery. As an adult, now living in California’s Gold Country, it’s a rarity in my diet. However, whenever I get to the Colonial House Inn, on Rte. 6-A, in Yarmouth Port, I always order the Indian Pudding.
Like Betty, I was in my 20’s when I first had Indian Pudding. I loved it but I I left Connecticut and now live in the Midwest so if I want it I have to make it myself. My wife, raised in Indiana, had never heard of it before she met me. I think the flavor is too strange and not sugary enough for modern kids who eat a lot of sugary foods with little taste.
WOW… I haven’t thought of Indian pudding in Years.. when on Facebook Come a flash fro9m the past from Clair LeFebvre Jones( No relation!!) My recipe is from the original Fanny Farmer cook Book… 4 cups Milk, 1/2 cupellow cornmeal, 1/3 cup Dark Broun sugar, 1/3 cup granulated sugar… 1/3 cup molasses, 1 teasp, salt , 4 tbls. Butter, 1/2 teas powdered ginger, 1/2 teas cinnamon…..Preheat oven to 275… Heat 2 cups milk until very hot.. Pour slowly over cornmeal, stir or whisk constantly….. Cook in double boiler until mixture is creamy about 10 minutes… add remaining ingreadients mix well… Spoon into buttered 1and 1/2 quart baking dish… Pour the remainig 2cups of milk over the top… Set into another pan of hot water… Bake for 2and 1/2 hrs to 3… until set.. Pudding will become firmer as it cools… Serve with heavy cream or vanilla ice cream!!! Delicious!! and very different!! Wow thanks so much for sharing… I loved this desert as a child in New England
Does anyone else out there remember when Howard Johnsons restaurants used to have Indian Pudding on their menus? My Mom and I would go there and enjoy it for dessert with vanilla ice cream on top. I have made it several times over the years and the old-fashioned flavor always brings me back to those dinners at “HoJo’s” with Mom!
I love Indian Pudding! A meal in itself at Durgin Park. Thanks for the recipe, I’m putting it on my Christmas menu. Yes, I do remember it at “HoJo,s” with their great ice cream. My mouth is watering.
I remember the Indian Pudding at the Hearth and Kettle in Hyannis,MA.
Does anyone have that recipe?
Betty, I grew up on Indian pudding, too, and this recipe is the same one I found stuck in on e of my mom’s cookbooks. She (and my grandmother) never used the water bath, and NEVER would they add raisins or nuts!
Love your mentions of the Newport Creamery and the Colonial House Inn in Yarmouth Port – we’ve stayed there, too.
I do remember Howard Johnson’s Indian Pudding and was very sad when I couldn’t buy it any longer. Over the years I’ve been looking for a recipe that would taste like their pudding. Did your recipe taste like theirs and would you be willing to share it with me?
I do make Indian Pudding every year. I do use a water bath and watch for it to set up. I have a recipe from my mom’s cookbook. It is a warm comfort food!
Martha – agreed! I grew up with my mom making it – with a water bath – and never, ever add raisins or nuts – it just wouldn’t be the same. I can’t wait for later this month when I can get a nice warm bowl of it with vanilla ice cream at the Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival in Waltham, MA. http://www.goreplace.org/sheepshearing.htm
I have been making Indian Pudding for years here at home and when I cooked professionally at a rather old nursing homes in Rhode Island.
This was a favourite dish among the older generation.
We have it here at home a couple of times a year.
My recipe is not measured but done by eye and taste.
Heat up milk and a knob of butter in a double boiler.Add a little salt. Whisk in cornmeal and cook until you have a thick porridge.
Whisk in molasses and brown sugar to taste. Using straight molasses was probably the original method but it makes a more bitter end product, Try using a 50/50 ratio of molasses and brown sugar.
Whisk in ground ginger, cinnamon, ground cloves and freshly grated nutmeg, again to taste.
I myself make it so the ginger and cloves are a bit more pronounced, so light on the cinnamon, very light on the nutmeg.
Transfer the porridge to an ample sized, greased baking dish (pottery is best, though heavy glass is fine too).
Pour 1/2′ layer of milk on top.
Carefully transfer the baking dish to a 350F oven and bake for about 45 minutes.
Remove it from the oven, stir the pudding and then top it with another 1/2″ layer of milk.
Bake for another 45 minutes. Stir the pudding again.
I usually stop at this point but if you’ve got the oven going all day, you can repeat the process a few more times.
Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or with heavy cream poured on top.
The image posted of the slice of pudding above looks delicious but is firmer than any version I’ve made. The final product is spooned into a small serving dish.
Also I would never add eggs, raisins or nuts.
BMB
I was just reading your post, I wish I had seen this a few days ago. I grew up eating my grandma’s
Indian pudding…in Northern Me and I guess like many others I did not care that much for it but now
I have had a craving for it for a while but I did not know what she used in it or how it was made.
I just married a Vietnamese woman and want to give her the experience of an American Thanksgiving
so I made Indian pudding for the first time…it came out pretty good but for Christmas I am going to
try your ideas.
AM
Plimouth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for thanksgiving, serves a very very traditional, delicious Indian Bread Pudding. I had it last thanksgiving… it was the same menu as the first official thanksgiving in Lincoln’s time.
I loved in New Hampshire for 8 years and never heard of it but I would try it! I fondly remember whoopie pies and pork pies though 🙂
I have recently made it from corn meal that was milled at the Jenny Grist Mill in Plymouth, MA. I used their recipe that they had recovered from a cookbook from the 1700’s. It call for 300 degrees for 2 hours, then add more milk and continue cooking for another hour. I loved it! Also you might be from New England if you have had grapenut pudding. 🙂
My grandmother made it every Thanksgiving. She used the same big ceramic bowl and baked it in the oven for hours.
There was a restaurant attached to the Colonial Motel out on Rt 5 in Brattleboro, VT. it had the best Indian pudding I’ve ever had. Warm and spicy with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream melting down over it. God’s gift to New England cuisine!
Always have just baked Indian pudding in a ceramic casserole type dish, with or without raisins, never with a water bath, and always served with french vanilla ice cream . Always had it between Thanksgiving and Christmas, budget dependent on pie as alternative. I will say, it must be a New England/Canadian acquired taste, my southern hubby did not care much for it.
My mother loved Grapenut pudding. Do you have a recipe for that?
This is the recipe I use and it’s great, from Yankee magazine in 2002. I grew up in far northwestern Pennsylvania and we used to come to New Hampshire to vacation when I was a child. Still look at your webcam weekly, but live in the San Francisco Bay area now…just had my 79th birthday, and still cooking good recipes from your magazine!
Indian Pudding
Total Time: 30 min.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Early colonists brought with them to America a fondness for British “hasty pudding,” a dish made by boiling wheat flour in water or milk until it thickened into porridge. Since wheat flour was scarce in the New World, settlers adapted by using native cornmeal, dubbed “Indian flour,” and flavoring the resulting mush to be either sweet (with maple syrup or molasses) or savory (with drippings or salted meat). In time, Indian pudding evolved into a dish that was resoundingly sweet, with lots of molasses and additional ingredients such as butter, cinnamon, ginger, eggs, and sometimes even raisins or nuts. Recipes for Indian pudding began appearing in cookery books in the late 1700s.
Ingredients:
• 4 cups whole milk
• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened, plus more for baking dish
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1 teaspoon table salt
• 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 300° and grease a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. I use an old dark brown bean pot looking casserole dish.
Bring milk to a simmer in a double boiler over high heat. Slowly add the cornmeal, whisking to combine. Continue to cook, whisking constantly, for 15 minutes.
Slowly add molasses, then remove from heat. Add maple syrup and the rest of the ingredients and stir until smooth.
Pour mixture into the prepared baking dish, and bake until the pudding is set and the top is browned…takes awhile.
The Yankee magazine 2002 recipe takes about 2 hours…looked further for the cooking time…then vanilla ice cream!
I still make my Memmieres pork pies for christmas dinner every year.
Indian pudding….not so much
Hi Gale,
We have a great recipe for Grapenut pudding: http://www.yankeemagazine.com/recipe/grapenut-pudding
Enjoy!
That’s where I get my pudding “fix.” My daughter is trying her hand at this as I type.!
I’m making our family recipe for Indian pudding right now, and was just poking around online looking for the origins of the recipe, correctly guessing that the “Indian” name was from the corn meal, not from actual native Americans making this pudding! My recipe was in my family as a child and every year since, a MUST for Thanksgiving AND Christmas. I wonder how long it was being made as a traditional dessert before I came along, but there’s not one alive to ask. We DO add raisins, but never nuts or eggs. I notice that my recipe uses a higher proportion of molasses. Whenever I’ve had this in a restaurant (rarely), it never has raisins, and it’s a much lighter color (less molasses).
It does require being home attending to it for several hours. And we serve it warm with whipped cream, in little pressed glass small bowls. I would love to find more of these small, clear bowls, but have never seen them in any antique, GoodWill, or consignment stores. Here’s the recipe:
! qt. scalded milk
1/3 cup cornmeal
2 TB flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1 cup water
3/4 cup molasses
1/3 cup sugar
3 TB butter
1 cup raisins
Mix cornmeal, flour, spices, molasses, and sugar together. Add to milk and pour into a stoneware pot (Corningware cooks it too fast and hot). Add the butter and raisins. Bake at 300 degrees for 3 hours, stirring for the first hour every 15 minutes, then every 30 minutes for the remaining 2 hours. It will still look too thin at the end of the cooking time, but it will set more as it cools. I make it a few days before serving, when I’m not so busy with other food prep, and refrigerate until the serving day. Take it out in the morning and let it come to room temp and put it in the oven on warm after the turkey comes out. If you have extra pudding it freezes perfectly.
When do you add the 1 cup of water?
I meant to say stoneware crock, not pot. Mine is about the size of a 2 1/2 – 3 qt. Corningware casserole dish.
One more point, I am amazed how many New Englanders have never heard of Indian pudding!! Invariably when folks are discussing Thanksgiving menus, and I mention Indian pudding, I have to tell them all about it because they have no idea what it is!
Just made it today for our dinner with friends who had never heard of it. It was a hit! Served it with french vanilla ice cream. No eggs, flour or raisins! Cook at 300° for one hour, pull out and pour 1 cup of milk on top, then cook for 2 hours. Comes out bubbly hot and cools to a smooth texture. Need to scald the milk before adding the other ingredients…
I went to Durgin Park with my grandfather as a child. I miss New England and the food
Love Indian pudding
I love old fashioned Indian Pudding, takes a long time to cook but that’s what makes it creamy and not grainy. Being from New England this has been a family favorite for years. This recipe has been around forever and it does use a water bath.
Preheat oven to 275
3 Cups whole milk
1 Cup heavy cream
½ Cup yellow cornmeal
½ Cup light brown sugar
½ Cup molasses
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp ground cloves
¼ tsp ground ginger
4 Large eggs
4 Tbl unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
Lightly grease a 6 – 8 cup souffle’ or casserole dish with butter. Do not use a cooking spray.
In a medium sauce pan scald milk. Pour cream into a large mixing bowl, add cornmeal, sugar, molasses, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger. Stir to combine and add to the scalded milk. Cook, stirring constantly over medium low heat until thickened to the consistency of syrup, approximately 8 – 10 minutes. Remove from heat.
In a bowl beat eggs with a whisk. Temper eggs by adding ½ cup of hot cornmeal whisking rapidly to incorporate the milk without cooking the eggs. Pour the egg mixture into the cornmeal vigorously whisking together as you pour. Stir in butter one piece at a time until melted. Pour mixture into prepared soufflé dish. Place on a shallow baking pan on center oven rack. Pour HOT water into baking pan 2/3 way up soufflé. Bake for 2 – 2 ½ hours. Test by inserting a tester NEAR the center, tester should come out clean. Cool slightly. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Also good served with heavy cream.
You accidentally got the “Triangle Trade” wrong. You left out England and instead blamed the US twice
Hi Tyson! Thanks for your comment! In the New England version of triangle trade, New England replaces Europe as one of the triangle points. The other two are Africa and the Caribbean. You can see maps of both “triangles” (traditional and New England) on the Wikipedia page on Triangle Trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade
What was the brand name of the canned Indian Pudding available at Boston area supermarkets not so long ago? It came,I think, with a gold and white label. Johnson’s? Comstock?
Howard Johnsons Restaurant served and sold cans of Indian Pudding. I worked in a Howard Johnsons Restaurant in 1962, right after I graduated from High School. The hot Indian Pudding was served with a very small scoop of their wonderful Vanilla Ice Cream. I loved it warm with the vanilla ice cream melting in it, Yum (making me hungry for it now, lol. I used to buy a can of it and warm it up at home and put vanilla ice cream in it. Unfortunately there are not any Howard Johnsons around my area and I cannot find any of their products in the stores. Guess I will have to use this recipe and make my own. Thank you for this Indian Pudding recipe 🙂
I,too, worked at Howard Johnson’s in Boston – 1964. The Indian Pudding was fabulous – not so much the “too small trays” we had to use!!
Howard Johnson’s is where I first had Indian Pudding one Thanksgiving, and it was delicious, as was the rest of the feast. That first spoonful was a treat for the tastebuds. I’ve been making my own ever since. My favorite recipe so far has been Craig Claiborne’s, now looking forward to trying this one!
I had Indian pudding on my first trip to New England in 1981 at a small sandwich/ breakfast /coffee shop / in Bar Harbor, Me . in the heart of Bar Harbor. I’ve been back many times since. The Indian pudding was great, we got to watch them making a fresh batch as they mixed in a huge stainless pot . The pudding was wonderful but the shop has not been there in many years and I’ve never eaten Indian pudding since . Will try this recipe. Thanks
The family story says my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother didn’t like the “gritty” feel of the cornmeal so she replaced the corn meal in her indian pudding recipe with cornflakes which is why our family always has cornflakes pudding instead of Indian Pudding for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Another version of the story is she was out of corn meal, but had a box of cornflakes which she used as a substitute for the corn meal and discovered she like it better. We still make the pudding in my grandmother’s grandmother’s pudding pot. It looks like a large flower pot. Oh and we whip the heavy cream into whip cream using her glass measure cup that came with an egg beater with a top to keep the cream from splashing out of the cup.
I made my Indian pudding in my mother’s bean pot for years. And, I have my grandmother’s beater in a pour measure just like yours.
Can you share Grandma’s recipe with corn flakes?
Can I use a liner????
I , too, grew up with Indian Pudding at Howard Johnson’s in the early 1960s… in Queens, NYC at the magnificent HoJo built in the 30s for the Worlds Fair- it had a grand, red carpeted spiral staircase, as well as an ice cream parlour… Indian Pudding remained on the menu after they discontinued it, and my mom and I would still try to order it…