A hasty pudding is just the grain and water boiled together. When you think about New England pudding dessert, you can forget creamy or mousse-like textures. A Christmas pudding, with Northern England influences, could be a combination of bread crumbled into milk, boiled with butter and eggs and baked with spices and dried fruit. Puddings and pudding pies could be sweet or savory, simple or complex. Fannie Farmer, a famous Boston cookbook author, mentions at least three varieties of brown bread.
Indian pudding is the dessert that comes to mind when most people think of New England sweets.
Two key ingredients, corn and molasses, were unique to the New World. A simple Indian pudding is a combination of cornmeal, eggs, sugar and salt which is boiled. If you want to be true to the original technique, you'll boil it over a fire for twelve hours. Rice pudding traveled from Britain and became a New England mainstay. Considered costly and elegant, there were many variations of this creamy pudding.