Indian Pudding Day

What the day is

Indian Pudding Day is observed on November 13. The dish is a slow-baked New England dessert of cornmeal, milk and molasses, spiced and cooked for hours until it sets into something between a custard and a porridge.

It sits close to Thanksgiving on the calendar, which is part of why a persistent misunderstanding attaches to it.

Origin and background

The name does not mean the pudding was created by Indigenous Americans. English colonists called maize Indian corn, to distinguish it from what they called corn, meaning wheat and other European grains. Indian pudding therefore means cornmeal pudding, and the dish itself is an English hasty pudding adapted to the grain that was available in North America.

The distinction matters. Maize was domesticated and bred over thousands of years by Indigenous farmers across the Americas, and that agricultural achievement is real and substantial. The pudding is a colonial adaptation of an English recipe using that crop, and claims that it was served at the first Thanksgiving are not supported by the surviving accounts of that meal.

Molasses is the other defining ingredient, cheap and abundant in New England through Caribbean trade built on slavery, which is part of the history of this dessert as of much colonial American cooking.

Technically it is a long, slow bake. Cornmeal needs extended moist heat to hydrate properly, and rushing it at high temperature leaves the texture gritty. Traditional recipes left it in a cooling brick oven for several hours or overnight. It is now genuinely uncommon outside older New England restaurants, which is part of why it has a day at all.

How to take part

• Cook the cornmeal into the milk on the stovetop first, until it thickens, before baking.
• Use dark unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is too bitter here.
• Bake low and long, two to three hours, and resist raising the temperature.
• Pour a little cold milk over the surface partway through, a traditional step that gives a creamier top layer.
• Serve warm with vanilla ice cream, the standard New England pairing.
• If you want to mark Indigenous foodways specifically, cook from an Indigenous cookbook rather than this dish.