What is a Hasty Pudding?

[ChiefScott]

Why are the Harvard thespians named for one?

[Peregrine]

This site says that

…they mandated that “the members in alphabetical order shall provide a pot of hasty pudding for every meeting.” With this ritual, the Hasty Pudding club found its namesake…

Stuart Berg Flexner, in “I Hear America Talking”, Van Nostrand Reinhold, c.1976, says (page 70),

One of the first widely talked about native American desserts was hasty pudding (1691), cornmeal boiled and served with milk or molasses over it.

(Flexner’s italics)

In “The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary”, Oxford University Press, c. 1971, I found the following entry (page 1263):

Hasty Pudding A pudding made of flour stirred in boiling milk or water to the consistency of a thick batter; in some parts applied to a similar preparation of oatmeal (usually called ‘porridge’); in U.S. made with Indian meal and water.

You may also be interested in the mock-heroic poem “The Hasty Pudding” by Joel Barlow (1792).

[bibliophage]

By the way, hasty pudding is mentioned in the song “Yankee Doodle.” My first-grade teacher was nuts about the Revolutionary War and made us some hasty pudding one day. I didn’t like it.

Father and I went down to camp,
Along with Captain Gooding;
And there we saw the men and boys,
As thick as hasty pudding.

[Punoqllads]

I would like to state, for the record, that “Hasty Pudding” would make an excellent name for a rock band.

“Ah, our next song I wrote coming down off a three-day heroin jag. It’s called ‘Hurl’. Two! Three! Four!”