The narrator of Lydia Maria Child's classic Thanksgiving poem, "Over the River and Through the Wood", finally gets to his grandfather's house for Thanksgiving dinner at the end of the piece.
The small boy exclaimed joy for the fun. The pudding is done. I wish for the pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin pie is similar to pudding. It doesn't seem right to headline a description of a dinner. Why was pudding the first thing the boy thought of when he was young?
Most Americans think of pudding as a dessert consisting of rice pudding, bread pudding, and chocolate pudding. It could be associated with pudding mixes. I used to love making pudding when I was a child by shaking the pudding in the jug.
Most Americans don't think about pudding at all. It has turned into a small and uninteresting subcategory.
When Child wrote "Over the River and Through the Wood" in the 19th century, Thanksgiving became a national holiday. Most American books back then had a chapter devoted to puddings.
When Child wrote her poem, pudding was an important part of American food.
It is not known what type of pudding Lydia Maria Child had in mind for her poem. It can be difficult to define pudding as an umbrella term.
Americans ate puddings. They also ate main course puddings such as steak and kidney pudding, pigeon pudding, and mutton pudding, which were often covered with a flour or potato crust. The other puddings didn't have a crust at all. Yorkshire pudding was a sort of cooked batter. Green bean puddings, carrot puddings, and dozens of other vegetable varieties were on display. There are many ways to cook puddings, they can be baked, steamed, or boiled.
There were other puddings that did not have the same resemblance to what we are talking about today. An apple stuffed with leftover rice is nothing more than apple pudding. Hasty pudding was made from corn meal.
There were many ways in which puddings were consumed. They could be a lot of dishes, dense with eggs and covered in fruit and brandy. They could be a rich stew made of golden pastry. puddings were the center of feasts in these forms.
It is possible that puddings could be even more humble. Like soups, puddings could be made of almost anything and could fit all kinds of kitchen scraps. The 19th-century Americans ate a wide variety of food, not just bread and rice, but also oatmeal, crackers and potatoes. Poor man's pudding, poverty pudding and economic pudding are examples of pudding's role as a cheap, filling meal in some recipes.
Why didn't pudding come back? A defining part of American cuisine has largely disappeared.
Food reform was one of the reasons. By the early 20th century, new knowledge about nutrition science and an obsessive interest in digestion caused experts to condemn dishes with a range of ingredients mixed together. White Americans came to associate mixed foods with immigrants because of this.
The reformers insisted that it was better to eat simple foods with few ingredients if you separated the meats and vegetables. People started to think that savory puddings were old fashioned.
The prevalence and zeal of American food reformers in the early 20th century helped to explain why so many puddings disappeared in the US.
By the 20th century, claims about the dangers of mixed food had been discredited. The casserole replaced puddings as the new type of dish. casseroles can be made from almost anything and can accommodate a lot of odds and ends. There were a lot of casseroles.
The food industry had made pudding a convenience food. Many Americans have never eaten puddings made from supermarket mixes.
The classic versions still exist. Americans are more likely to eat 19th century-style puddings on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year. Some American tables feature Indian pudding, sweet potato pudding or corn pudding. Thanksgiving dinner isn't the time capsule some people think it is, and most Thanksgiving menus don't have anything in common with the 17th century meal they commemorate. There are some similarities between the 19th century and the present day.
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