At the tip of “Over the River and Through the Wood” – Lydia Maria Child’s classic Thanksgiving poem – the narrator finally gets to his grandfather’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and settles right down to eat.
“Hurrah for the fun!” the small boy exclaims. “Is the pudding done? Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!”
Pumpkin pie sounds familiar, but pudding? It looks like an odd alternative to headline an outline of a Thanksgiving dinner. Why was pudding the primary dish on the boy’s mind, and never turkey or stuffing?
When Americans today take into consideration pudding, most of us consider a sweet dessert, heavy on milk and eggs: rice pudding, bread pudding, chocolate pudding. Or we’d associate it with Jell-O pudding mixes. (When I used to be a toddler within the Nineteen Eighties, I loved making pudding by shaking Jell-O fast pudding powder with milk in a plastic jug.)
For probably the most part, though, Americans today don’t think much about pudding in any respect. It’s grow to be a small and fairly forgettable subcategory.
That’s a dramatic change from the mid-Nineteenth century, the period when Child wrote “Over the River and Through the Wood” and when Thanksgiving became a national holiday under President Lincoln. Back then, virtually every American cookbook had a chapter dedicated to puddings (sometimes two or three).
Pudding was necessary in Child’s poem because, when she wrote it, pudding was such a crucial a part of American cuisine.
From small budgets to banquets
It’s not clear what form of pudding Lydia Maria Child had in mind for her Thanksgiving poem since it was a remarkably elastic category. Pudding was such an umbrella term, actually, it may well be hard to define it in any respect.
Americans ate dessert puddings we’d recognize today. But in addition they ate principal course puddings like steak and kidney pudding, pigeon pudding or mutton pudding, where stewed meats were often surrounded by a flour or potato crust. Other puddings had no crust in any respect. Some, like Yorkshire pudding, were a form of cooked batter. There were also green bean puddings, carrot puddings and dozens of other vegetable varieties. Puddings could possibly be baked or steamed or boiled in a floured cloth.
Then there have been other dishes called puddings that didn’t bear any resemblance in any way to what we mean by that word today. For example, apple pudding could possibly be nothing greater than a baked apple full of leftover rice. Hasty pudding was essentially cornmeal mush.
Library of Congress
Puddings were also hard to define because they were consumed in so many alternative ways. They could possibly be sumptuous dishes, dense with suet and eggs, studded with candied fruits and drenched in brandy. Or they could possibly be wealthy, meaty stews encased in golden pastry. In these forms, puddings appeared on banquet tables and because the centerpieces of feasts.
But puddings is also much humbler. Cooks with small budgets valued them because, like soups, puddings could possibly be product of almost anything and will accommodate every kind of kitchen scraps. They were especially useful as vehicles for stale bread and leftover starches, and Nineteenth-century Americans ate a wide range made not only with bread and rice but with cornmeal, oatmeal, crackers and potatoes. Recipes with names like “poor man’s pudding,” “poverty pudding” and “economical pudding” reflect pudding’s role as an inexpensive, filling meal.
Food ‘experts’ exert their influence
So what happened to pudding? Why did this broad culinary category, a defining a part of American cuisine for greater than a century, largely disappear?
One reason was food reform. By the early Twentieth century, recent knowledge about nutrition science, combined with an obsessive (but misinformed) interest in digestion, fueled widespread “expert” condemnation of dishes featuring a spread of ingredients mixed together. This was due, largely, to xenophobia; by then, many white Americans had come to associate mixed foods with immigrants.
Instead, reformers insisted with great confidence (but scant evidence) that it was healthier to eat easy foods with few ingredients: meals where meats and plain vegetables were clearly separated. People began to view savory puddings as each unhealthy and old-fashioned.
The unique prevalence and zeal of American food reformers within the early Twentieth century helps to elucidate why so many puddings disappeared within the United States, while they proceed to be a crucial a part of British cuisine.
By the mid-Twentieth century, claims in regards to the digestive dangers of mixed foods had been debunked. But a brand new form of dish had since emerged – the casserole – which largely usurped the role formerly played by puddings. An elastic category in their very own right, casseroles is also produced from almost anything and will accommodate all kinds of odds and ends. There were hamburger casseroles, green bean casseroles and potato casseroles.
At the identical time, the food industry had reimagined pudding as a cloyingly sweet convenience food. Puddings produced from supermarket mixes of modified food starch and artificial flavors became the one kind many Americans ever ate.
The classic versions haven’t completely disappeared, nevertheless. On Thanksgiving, Americans are still more more likely to eat Nineteenth-century-style puddings than at every other time of the yr. On some American tables, Indian pudding, sweet potato pudding or corn pudding make an annual appearance. Thanksgiving dinner isn’t the time capsule some people imagine, and most Thanksgiving menus today have hardly anything in common with the Seventeenth-century Plymouth Colony meal they commemorate. But there are some culinary echoes from the Nineteenth century, when the American national holiday officially began.