Joel Barlow’s hasty pudding

by Allan

We should imagine that language, both refined and vulgar, was invented to describe our food.   Our poets therefore should be both cooks and gourmands; we should in any event experiment with treating them as such.  To this end, a few months ago I made efforts to recreate the object of Joel Barlow’s heroic “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), with the help of an expert from Utah State University.

That’s Barlow, not the expert from USU.  Now I have cooked from Barlow before, but the hasty pudding would be tougher: succotash sounded good despite Barlow’s derision, so getting Life to live up to Art was easy, but how could any imminent pudding match Barlow’s transcendental descriptions?

I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel,
My morning incense, and my evening meal,
The sweets of Hasty Pudding. Come, dear bowl,
Glide o’er my palate, and inspire my soul.

And Barlow is clear that the simplicity of the dish makes not for easy preparation:

Ev’n Hasty Pudding, purest of all food,
May still be bad, indifferent, or good,
As sage experience the short process guides,
Or want of skill, or want of care presides:
Whoe’er would form it on the surest plan,
To rear the child and long sustain the man;
To shield the morals while it mends the size,
And all the powers of every food supplies,
Attend the lessons that the muse shall bring.

How then is the dish prepared?

The yellow flour, bestrewed and stirred with haste,
Swell in the flood and thickens to a paste,
Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,
Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim;
The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,
And the whole mass its true consistence takes.

That’s corn meal, for you Old Worlders.  The resulting pudding is eaten with milk; this, Barlow sings, “Shall cool and temper thy superior heat.”  That’s the heat of the pudding, mind you.

From all this (and, I admit, a few websites) we formulated the following recipe.  Scald 4 cups of milk, then add 3/4 cup of corn meal and plenty of salt.  Stir this for about 10 minutes until it thickens, then remove from the heat and cool.  Add two beaten eggs, and then bake in a buttered dish at 325° for 2 hours.  The result is a semi-solid quivering mass of yellow, corn-flavored mush, a kind of wet, fluffy cornbread.  With milk, as Barlow repeatedly prescribes, it was delicious.

A notable feature of Barlow’s account of hasty pudding is his description of the different names for the dish.  In both regional American dialects and foreign tongues we find a rich plurality that seems to both delight and distress the poet: hasty pudding is also called polenta (France), Indian mush (Pennsylvania), and suppawn (New York), but it’s real name is “Hasty Pudding.”  This vertiginous diversity, of course,  belies something universal: the fact that everyone has a different name for hasty pudding means that everyone eats hasty pudding!

To mark this crucial point, we cooked a second pudding, this time taking loose inspiration from a brief recipe that appears in Barlow’s regional tour: “in dear New England” hasty pudding “Receives a dash of pumpkin in the paste, / To give it sweetness and improve the taste,” and later Barlow notes that “Some with molasses line the luscious treat, / And mix, like bards, the useful with the sweet.”  Short of pumpkin, we opted for molasses (about 1/2 a cup) along with tablespoons of nutmeg and cinnamon.  The resulting pudding was dark brown and rich, suitable for dessert, or (of course) an American breakfast.  (One could sweeten this dish quite a bit more or not at all — with more molasses, or cane sugar, or honey.)

Barlow’s concern with the word for the dish (names other than “Hasty Pudding” are “spurious appellations, void of truth”) is important.  The poem finishes up more predictably, with descriptions of corn harvests and eating hasty pudding (including an extended digression on the right type of spoon to use).  The initial obsession with naming the dish suggests the kind of magical thinking on which it would be something deep and powerful to know the name of God.  It also reminds us that our secular, material puddings are but reflections of a sacred, invisible ideal — even granting his satirical intent, Barlow’s Hasty Pudding ends up a lofty and elusive creature, a form rather than a concrete plate of food, far removed from the meals of common life that inspired him.  This point detracts not a whit from the excellence of the food that can be prepared with “The Hasty Pudding” as a template.  But the invisible, we must remind ourselves, is also inedible.