Boil a pint of milk, and set it off from the fire. Then stir in a large teacup of Indian meal, a cup of finely chopped suet, half a cup of white flour, the same of molasses, and a teaspoonful each of salt, ginger, and cinnamon. Grease thick a deep fire-proof patty pan, or a brown earthen one with a small top, such as are made for baking beans, and pour in the mixture; then stir in half a pint of cold milk. Bake it in a moderate heat two hours. If you object to using suet, substitute two eggs well beaten. An excellent sauce for this, and all kinds of Indian pudding, is made by mixing sour cream and sugar, seasoned with nutmeg.
The modern ovens do not bake this kind of pudding as well as a brick oven.
Another (with Sweet Apples).
Pare twelve sweet apples and slice them, or take out the cores with a tap-borer. Stir up a pudding of a quart of milk, and almost a quart of Indian meal; the measure may be filled quite full by using a spoonful or two of wheat flour. Add some salt, a teacup of molasses, and a little chopped suet. The milk should be boiled, and after it is taken from the fire, the meal and other ingredients stirred in. Then pour the whole over the apples. Bake three hours.
Boiled Plum.
Put to a quart of boiled milk twelve pounded crackers, a quarter of a pound of suet, a pound of currants, half a pound of raisins, a little salt, and a teacup of molasses. Steam in a pudding-pan, or boil it three hours and a half in a cloth or buttered bowl. To be eaten with sauce.
Railroad.
One cup of molasses, one of sweet milk, one of suet or of salt pork chopped fine; four cups of flour, one teaspoonful of saleratus, and if suet is used, one of salt, one cup of chopped raisins, one of currants. Warm the molasses and stir the saleratus into it; mix the suet or pork with the flour, then stir all together, and steam it four hours, according to the directions for Steamed Brown Bread (see page [31]). Make a melted sauce, or the sour cream sauce.
Rice.
Wash a small coffee-cup of rice and put it into three pints of milk over night. In the morning add a piece of butter half as large as an egg, a teacup of sugar, a little salt, cinnamon, or nutmeg. Bake very slowly two hours and a half in a stove or brick oven. After it has become hot enough to melt the butter, but not to brown the top, stir it (without moving the dish if you can) from the bottom. If raisins are to be used, put them in now. They add much to the richness of the pudding. It is a very good pudding for so plain a kind, and is very little trouble. For a Sunday dinner, where a cooking stove is used, it is very convenient, as it employs but a few minutes to prepare it in the morning.