The Old-School Breakfast Pudding Your Grandma Probably Ate

Glance at a modern breakfast buffet, and you'll find dishes like avocado toast, overnight oats, and vibrant acai bowls gracing the table. But once upon a time, the standard morning nibble was a little simpler. In fact, there was an old-school breakfast pudding your grandma probably ate that was a common sight among many cash-strapped families due to its affordability and filling nature: Cornmeal pudding.

Featuring a base of cornmeal that was cooked in either milk or water and sweetened with sugar or honey, cornmeal pudding was close in texture to a porridge but had a nuttier flavor and a warmer yellow color. Inexpensive and quick to prepare, the versatility of the dish meant it could be served in an array of different styles to suit whatever was in the pantry.

This hearty dish was one of the Depression-era breakfasts that was cobbled together with ingredients that were cheap and always on hand following the Wall Street crash of 1929. Families that had been hit with unemployment had to get creative with their meals to stretch their grocery budgets and turned to shelf-stable options like cornmeal that were nutritious and filling. That said, cornmeal dishes had been a firm fixture within indigenous communities for many years before the economic downturn, so they weren't a new phenomenon but a bridge that connected native culinary traditions with depression era practices. 

There were several ways to elevate cornmeal pudding, such as sprinkling in warming spices like cinnamon, ginger, or nutmeg, or drizzling over a sticky helping of molasses. However, it could also be served simply in a savory style by nixing the sugar and topping it with a pat of butter. Rural households that kept chickens could easily add a fried egg (or crack a raw egg into the pudding and stir it through while hot to amp up its protein content and make it more filling). Leftover cornmeal pudding that had set and thickened was often cut into slices and fried the next day until the exterior was crisp and the middle soft and tender in the same way as a similar dish called cornmeal mush (a combination of cornmeal and water).

If you want to make cornmeal pudding today, consider preparing it with coconut milk or a dash of heavy cream to give it a richer texture. This move will take your breakfast into the territory of a baked Jamaican-style cornmeal pudding that has an almost custardy consistency and is traditionally topped with raisins.

Other classic breakfast foods that have vanished from tables include spam cakes (slices of spam fried in batter) and milk toast (chunks of toast soaked in hot milk). Both these dishes were cheap to prepare and were an inventive way of using readily available ingredients.