Home › Pastry and Puddings › Cherry Pudding
Cherry Pudding
A nice pudding can be made by boiling one-half pint of rice half an hour in five times as much water, and pouring it boiling hot into one pint of wheat meal. Mix thoroughly, and place it in small spoonfuls in a nappy-a round earthen dish with flat bottom and sloping sides-interlaying it with a pint of cherries. Steam half or three-quarters of an hour. Serve warm, trimming it with melted sugar, or sweetened cherry-juice, or some other sweet sauce. This recipe can be used for such other small fruits in their season as will bear cooking enough to do the wheat-meal. Half an hour is the least that will answer for that purpose; threequarters of an hour is better.
A frugal steamed pudding built from cooked rice and whole-meal flour rather than eggs, butter or sugar. It is closer to a steamed dumpling batter than to a custard, and the sweetness comes entirely from the sauce.
- The hinge: the meal must cook throughThe boiling rice and its water are what cook the raw flour, so the mixture has to go into the steamer hot and stay there long enough. The recipe says half an hour minimum and three-quarters is better, and that is sound; underdone whole-meal tastes pasty and raw.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of rice is 1 cup dry; five times as much water is 5 cups. A pint of wheat meal is about 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz by weight. A pint of cherries is about 10 oz once pitted.
- Wheat mealThis is whole-wheat flour, coarser than modern all-purpose whole wheat but a reasonable stand-in. Graham flour is the closest current equivalent in texture.
- A nappyThe recipe defines it in passing: a round earthen dish with a flat bottom and sloping sides. Any wide heatproof bowl or a pie dish works, provided it fits inside the steamer with the lid down.
- Rice and waterHalf an hour at a bare simmer will leave the rice soft and the mixture soupy, which is what is wanted -- you are pouring hot rice porridge over flour, not draining fluffy grains. Do not rinse or drain.
- CherriesPit them. Sour cherries hold their shape and their acidity balances the plain dough far better than sweet ones. Frozen pitted sour cherries can go in unthawed.
- SteamingSet the dish on a rack over an inch or two of simmering water in a covered pot, or use a steamer basket. Cover the pudding loosely with foil so condensation does not pool on top.
- SweeteningThere is no sugar in the pudding itself. "Melted sugar" probably means sugar dissolved down to a syrup, though the book does not explain it; sweetened cherry juice, warmed and thickened slightly with cornstarch, is the easier choice.
- YieldServes 4 to 6 as written. It is dense and filling, and it firms up considerably as it cools -- serve it straight from the steamer.
This is a hygienic-reform pudding rather than a festive one. Recipes of this plain, whole-meal, steamed sort kept appearing in general household compilations well into the 1900s -- often, as here, with an explanatory aside about equipment ("a nappy-a round earthen dish"). The word nappy itself is an old English term for a shallow serving bowl. The final note about substituting other small fruits in season is the practical heart of it: this is a formula for using whatever the summer produced, with the pudding acting as ballast and the fruit supplying all the flavour.