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Pudding Pies and Cookie Cakes

Appears in
I Hear America Cooking
I Hear America Cooking

By Betty Fussell

Published 1986

  • About

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

I still expected pudding, however hasty, to be pudding. Pudding was made of Jello-O or junket or tapioca or rice or occasionally bread. I was disillusioned to discover that Hasty Pudding, like Indian pudding, sang “The sweets of Cornmeal Mush.”

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