November 13 is the Day New England Celebrates Its Oldest Dessert
New England is known around the country (and dare I say the world) for its incredible food, namely anything made with our freshly caught seafood. What we're not yet known for has its very own day on November 13 each year. It's a dessert that looks like an apple crumble pie with ice cream, but it's not.
It's called Indian pudding, and you can still find it on the menu in a few places. I'll get to those in a minute, as well as how to make your own.
If you've had it before, you know it's a gooey, bubbling concoction that's a runny and hot mess where you just add vanilla ice cream and dig in. The Take Out website hit the nail on the head when it described the dish as the most delicious, comforting, quintessentially New England food you can eat.
According to The Take Out, there’s no official first recipe. Indian pudding dates back to early English settlements in New England on Cape Cod in 1620, quickly growing to include Boston and eventually New England. The Take Out says it most likely started as a hasty pudding or porridge made with milk, sugar, and flour. When flour was hard to come by, cornmeal was used instead.
The recipe was later made with molasses because of easy access to the sweet syrup, and though it's not well-known anymore, there is a National Indian Pudding Day on November 13.
You can find Indian pudding on the menu at the Maine Diner in Wells, Maine, Galyn's in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. It can also be found at Boston's Union Oyster House, a National Historic Landmark and America’s oldest continuously-serving restaurant, open since 1826.
If you want a recipe to make your own, click here.