When you ask Donald Look for directions to Look’s Canning Co. in Whiting, his answer is simple.

“Take Route 191 South,” he says. “You can’t miss it.”

And you can’t. As the road winds its way around Holmes Bay, overlooking Cutler, Look’s pops up on a knoll like a giant clam shack. A rusty, red railroad car sits out front with a fake vulture perched on top, which usually prompts visitors “from away” to take pictures, thinking it’s real.

“You know when you see those things at Wal-Mart and ask yourself what type of person buys that?” Look’s daughter Linda Huntley asked, laughing. “Now you know.”

It’s a modern touch in a place that hasn’t changed much since Look’s father, Willard, started canning seafood in 1917. The building is simple and gray. Inside, it smells like chowder. A very small showroom is stacked with cans of seafood, chowders and Indian pudding Look’s sells under the Atlantic, Bar Harbor and Cap’n John labels. A row of green-painted, 75-year-old canning machines lines the walls of the bottom floor.

And the recipes are still the same.

“When you have something that works, don’t wreck it,” Look said of his Indian pudding recipe, which hasn’t changed since he first made it in 1947.

Look, 76, has worked at the canning company since he was a boy, and he’s been “messing with food and cooking for nearly 60 years.” He took over the business 10 years ago, when his brother Anthony retired.

The younger Look learned to cook in the Navy during World War II, the only time he’s left Whiting for an extended period.

“I’m living right where I was born,” he said, looking out his office window at the hillside that four generations of Looks have called home. “I’ve lived here all my life except for three years’ vacation – the trip around the world that Franklin Roosevelt arranged for me in World War II.”

Though he cooked for 2,500 sailors at a time, he never made Indian pudding for them. That came later, when S.S. Pierce, a now-defunct food trading company based in Massachusetts, asked him to develop the recipe. He didn’t have to look far for inspiration.

“I remember my mother had a pot of this going all the time,” Look said. “She’d dish it out after supper with some whipped cream and that’s what we had for dessert. She never measured anything. She’d throw in a handful of cornmeal, a little milk, a little molasses, a pinch of this and a pinch of that.”

It’s a simple recipe, but it takes about five hours from start to finish, so it lent itself well to the low, slow cooking of traditional wood-fired, cast-iron stoves.

“It isn’t a hard dish to put together, it just takes time to cure it,” Look said.

Though the dish was a staple in Look’s youth, no one in the family makes it anymore. They just heat up a can of Atlantic brand Indian pudding.

“They don’t need to make their own,” Look said. “I make it better than they can make it at home.”

The pudding, which is a mixture of cornmeal, milk, molasses, butter, cinnamon and ginger, tastes similar to pumpkin pie filling. It’s a traditional New England dish developed by the region’s English settlers, who had to adapt their recipes to the grains that grew well here.

“An Indian pudding is really a variation on an oat pudding, a basic oat gruel enhanced with some spices,” said Sandra Oliver, a food historian from Islesboro.

The settlers called all grains “corn,” and distinguished among them with names such as “English corn,” which we call wheat, and “Indian corn,” which we call maize or simply corn.

“When they used that grain in their cooking, they’d call it ‘Indian,'” Oliver said.

Because corn was native to the area, it thrived here, so the settlers substituted it for the grains they usually cooked with.

“They sized up the ingredients and said this ingredient behaves like x, y, or z that I had in England,” Oliver said. “Cornmeal behaved culinarily much like oats or oatmeal.”

Over time, the recipe for Indian pudding evolved. In the South, for example, the dish is so dense you could almost cut it. Here, it’s more like a custard, Oliver said.

“It really almost sort of evaporates rather than bakes,” she said. “It’s a splendid winter dish.”

Look won’t argue. For more than 50 years, his Indian pudding has been a Down East favorite. His son Leslie does the cooking now, but it’s still made the same way – mixed by hand in a 60-gallon stainless-steel bowl. And while there are many fancy premade desserts on the market, Look’s old-fashioned Indian pudding still has a following.

“It’s a matter of taste,” Look said. “Everyone’s taste is different. If they all were the same, we wouldn’t be in business.”

Atlantic brand Indian pudding is available at Hannaford Bros. stores throughout the state. For information, call Look’s at 259-3341.