Hasty Pudding- January 2016 Recipe of the Month

I think hasty pudding was one of the items I cooked during my first hearth cooking sessions in the Phoenix Mill House. It’s really, really easy.

Hasty Pudding

4 cups water

1 cup cornmeal

½ teaspoon salt (optional)

Bring water to a boil, then stir in cornmeal. Keep stirring (up to 10 minutes) until mixture thickens up like porridge.

In earlier days, hasty pudding might have shown up in some form or another at any meal of the day. Hot cornmeal mush could be served for breakfast or supper, but a frugal housewife might also have served cornmeal mush at the start of the midday meal, the main meal of the day, as a quick and inexpensive way to start filling hungry stomachs. This practice is similar to the current practice in restaurants of serving bread before the main course arrives.

Actually my favorite way of eating hasty pudding is frying it. Either use the previous meal’s leftover porridge or make a fresh batch of mush. Put the porridge in a buttered loaf pan. As it cools it will start to solidify. Once this has happened, just slice the loaf and fry the pieces in butter until both sides are golden brown. This is really good served hot with maple syrup or honey and, of course, more butter!

Did you know hasty pudding is even mentioned in a verse from the song, Yankee Doodle?

Fath’r and I went down to camp

Along with Captain Goodin’,[6]

And there we saw the men and boys

As thick as hasty puddin’

And one more thing. When you see polenta on the menu of some fancy restaurant, do you know what they’re serving? Hasty pudding! Granted they’ve probably added some cheese, herbs, etc., but polenta is basically the same thing women have been cooking in America since the 17th century.

Enjoy!

Lorraine Walker