Pudding Pies and Cookie Cakes

When I had my first bite of Indian pudding, from an S. S. Pierce can in 1949, I was gravely disappointed because I expected pudding, not molasses-flavored mush. When I learned that same year the source of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club in Joel Barlow’s famous eighteenth-century mock-epic poem:

I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel,

My morning incense, and my evening meal—

The sweets of Hasty Pudding