A CUSTARD PUDDING.—
Take five table-spoonfuls out of a quart of cream or rich milk, and mix them with two large spoonfuls of fine flour. Set the rest of the milk to boil, flavouring it with half a dozen peach leaves, or with bitter almonds broken up. When it has boiled hard, take it off, strain it, and stir it in the cold milk and flour. Set it away to cool, and beat well eight yolks and four whites of eggs; add them to the milk, and stir in, at the last, a glass of brandy or white wine, a powdered nutmeg, and a quarter of a pound of sugar. Butter a large bowl or mould; pour in the mixture; tie a cloth tightly over it; put it into a pot of boiling water, and boil it two hours, replenishing the pot with hot water from a tea-kettle. When the pudding is done, let it get cool before you turn it out. Eat it with butter and sugar stirred together to a cream, and flavoured with lemon juice or orange.
FLOUR HASTY PUDDING.—
Tie together half a dozen peach-leaves, put them into a quart of milk, and set it on the fire to boil. When it has come to a hard boil, take out the leaves, but let the pot remain boiling on the fire. Then with a large wooden spoon in one hand, and some wheat flour in the other, thicken and stir it till it is about the consistence of a boiled custard. Afterwards throw in, one at a time, a dozen small bits of butter rolled in a thick coat of flour. You may enrich it by stirring in a beaten egg or two, a few minutes before you take it from the fire. When done, pour it into a deep dish, and strew brown sugar thickly over the top. Eat it warm.
INDIAN MUSH.—
Have ready on the fire a pot of boiling water. Stir into it by degrees (a handful at a time) sufficient Indian meal to make it very thick, and then add a very small portion of salt. You must keep the pot boiling on the fire all the time you are throwing in the meal; and between every handful, stir very hard with the mush-stick, (a round stick flattened at one end,) that the mush may not be lumpy. After it is sufficiently thick, keep it boiling for an hour longer, stirring it occasionally. Then cover the pot, and hang it higher up the chimney, so as to simmer slowly or keep hot for another hour. The goodness of mush depends greatly on its being long and thoroughly boiled. If sufficiently cooked, it is wholesome and nutritious, but exactly the reverse, if made in haste. It is not too long to have it altogether three or four hours over the fire; on the contrary it will be much the better for it.
Eat it warm; either with milk, or cover your plate with mush, make a hole in the middle, put some butter in the hole and fill it up with molasses.
Cold mush that has been left, may be cut into slices and fried in butter.
Burgoo is made precisely in the same manner as mush, but with oatmeal instead of Indian.