Hasty Pudding

Hasty pudding was basically a stirred cornmeal porridge that became a symbol of classlessness and independence in eighteenth-century America. It was known at every hearth of the time, regardless of class or ethnic origin. Its reference in “Yankee Doodle,” a song of the Revolutionary War period—“And there we saw the men and boys / as thick as hasty pudding”—testifies that it was so widely known that it could be used as a simile.

Likewise, the Connecticut poet Joel Barlow, contributing to the American literary genre born after the Revolutionary War, wrote a long, mock-epic poem, “The Hasty Pudding,” extolling the dish. Somewhat tongue in cheek, he not only gave detailed cooking instructions but also sentimentalized the dish’s virtues as a wholesome food of the new democracy and the “common man.”