While a person is celebrating National Indian Pudding Day and getting ready to make this dessert, they may be tempted to think that it’s a Native American dessert. Unfortunately, they would be wrong. That’s because this isn’t a Native American dessert, despite its name.
As many culinary scientists have pointed out before us, Native Americans didn’t have molasses or milk to cook with, so they couldn’t have made Indian pudding. No, this pudding was the invention of settlers to the New World.
They just used newly discovered cornmeal to make an Old World treat. The British had been making a dessert named hasty pudding since the 16th century, if not earlier. This pudding is made of wheat flour that’s cooked in boiling milk until it’s made into a thick batter.
In a 17th-century cookbook, there were three types of hasty pudding one could make. The first recipe was made with butter, flour, currants, and raisins. The second type was made like a boiled pudding, and the final one was made using grated bread, sugar, and eggs.
When settlers from Britain came to the New World, they simply swapped out the wheat in hasty pudding with cornmeal and used molasses for sugar. This created the iconic dessert that’s well-known in New England but isn’t all that popular throughout the rest of the U.S.
- This dish got its name because its main ingredient, cornmeal, used to be called Indian meal.
- During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian pudding was popular but fell out of favor during the 1920s.
- The rise of packaged puddings was one of the reasons why Indian pudding isn’t well known today.