Hasty pudding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hasty pudding is a porridge-like dish of cooked grain. It is now most often associated with the American version made of ground maize or corn, but may have started out as an English oat porridge. Hasty pudding was used as a term for an oatmeal porridge in England when Hannah Glasse wrote her 18th-century book The Art of Cookery.
Also known as corn mush or Indian mush, hasty pudding in its simplest form is corn meal cooked slowly in water until it thickens. It may be eaten hot, or left to cool and solidify. Slices of the cold pudding may then be fried. Hasty pudding was once a popular American food because of its low cost, long shelf life, and versatility, and was eaten with both sweet and savory accompaniments, such as maple syrup, molasses, or salted meat. Count Rumford, an American inventor who disapproved of the Revolution and went to live in Europe, still liked his hasty pudding, hot, in a bowl of milk.
Eliza Leslie, the influential American cookbook author of the early 19th century, includes a recipe for flour hasty pudding in her 1840 Directions for Cookery, In Its Various Branches, and calls the corn type Indian mush (she calls an oatmeal version burgoo). She stresses the need for slow cooking rather than haste, and also recommends the use of a special mush-stick for stirring to prevent lumps.
This mush-stick is perhaps related to the pudding stick of the nursery rhyme beating.
Hasty pudding, itself, is memorialized in a verse of the early American song Yankee Doodle:
- Father and I went down to camp
- Along with Captain Goodin,
- And there we saw the men and boys
- As thick as hasty puddin'
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[edit] Indian pudding
Indian pudding is a more elaborate form of hasty pudding, with added ingredients such as molasses and spices, and is a traditional New England dessert.
[edit] Polenta and Mămăligă
Polenta is the Italian version of hasty pudding, with corn substituted for the wheat originally used by the Romans. Mămăligă is the Romanian version, also made with corn.
[edit] References
- Evan Jones, American Food: The Gastronomic Story (1981) Viking Books ISBN 0-394-74646-5
- Jonathan Norton Leonard, American Cooking: New England (1970) Time-Life Books
