Instant Pot Indian Pudding
Compared to the baked pudding, this recipe is considerably gussied up with spices and sugar to compensate for the flatness of flavor from the quick cooking technique. Still damn good, though. I based this kitchen-hack on a stovetop version once used by the cafeteria operator at a former Plymouth living history museum.If you don’t own the magic plug-in pressure cooker known as an Instant Pot, you can just stir up the ingredients and boil the mixture in a large saucepan, whisking pretty steadily, for about 20 to 25 minutes.
Ingredients
- ½ cup 2 ounces flint cornmeal
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- ¾ teaspoon ginger
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 3 cups whole milk
- ½ cup molasses (“old-fashioned,” not blackstrap)
- 2 tablespoons butter
Instructions
- Whisk together the cornmeal, sugar, ginger, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in the pot of the Instant Pot. Whisk in the milk gradually. Add the molasses and drop in the lump of butter.
- Set the Instant Pot to manual high pressure for 10 minutes. Allow natural release pressure for 15 minutes, and then quick pressure release.
- Remove lid and serve hot with cream or vanilla ice cream.
Notes
Read the story of Indian Pudding by Paula Marcoux here!
Try making the oven-baked version as well!
Didn’t work. Kept getting burn message from the Instant Pot because the cornmeal sank to the bottom and stuck there.
Dear Anonymous Cook,
Thank you for trying our recipe, and I’m very sorry to hear that your attempt was not a success. I make no claim to Instant Pot expertise, being more of an open-fire type of cook, so I took your critique seriously. This last evening we followed the recipe exactly as printed, pretending we had never before made it, let alone invented it. Indeed, we found that the cornmeal does tend to remain at the bottom of the pot, but it cooks to a perfectly tender consistency, a nice contrast with the buttery molasses goodness that sauces it above. (The semi-separation of the pudding is the strangely desirable “curdling” to which I refer in my accompanying essay: https://ediblesema.com/foodways/indian-pudding/).
The “Burn” notification you received from your appliance we could not reproduce, I’m relieved to report. Perhaps your cornmeal was very coarse? Even so, I find it hard to imagine how one half-cup of meal could challenge the nearly 4 cups of liquid cooking medium aggregated in the ingredient list. Regardless, I remain saddened by your results and only hope that you will take heart and try again.
Best,
Paula Marcoux
Same result for me. Soupy except for what burned to the bottom of the Instapot.
Darn! Now this is beginning to be a troublesome pattern! I’d love to know the common thread here. Would you mind contacting me to let me know what kind of cornmeal you used? As far as I can figure, that must be the culprit, since it’s the least standardized ingredient. I would really appreciate your help in tracking this down— paula@ediblesouthshore.com
(One thing that occurs to me is that when we first opened the InstantPot after the rest period, the pudding WAS in two layers, or phases: more liquidy and more firm. A quick stir with a spatula and it easily emulsified. Certainly no scorching, though…)
When we get to the bottom of this mystery, I’ll rewrite the web version of this recipe to banish this issue.
Best,
Paula
This pudding is just fantastic. I’ve made it in my wood fired oven and in the instant pot. Delicious both ways although the latter is faster for sure.
Worked great, delicious!
Just a thought: to avoid burn notice, make it with pot-in-pot technique. Steaming Trivet + 1 cup of water in the bottom of pot, with actual pudding in a bowl or pot that will fit in the IP on the trivet.