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Spice Pudding
Take one cupful of butter, one cupful of molasses, and one cupful of sweet milk, three cupfuls of flour, one teaspoonful of ground cloves, one of cinnamon, half a teaspoonful of allspice, one teaspoonful of soda, one egg, and plenty of raisins. Steam three hours. A liquid sauce for spice pudding is made by taking six tablespoonfuls of sugar, four tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, one tablespoonful of flour, ten of boiling water, and a small lump of tartaric acid; flavor with lemon. Mix thoroughly and boil.
A molasses steamed pudding of the old boiled-in-a-basin school, with a sharp sweet-sour sauce. The recipe assumes you know how a steamer is rigged and gives no quantities for raisins or yield, so those are worth settling before you start.
- The hinge: steady, gentle steamThe water under the mold must stay at a bare simmer for the full three hours and must never be allowed to boil dry. Top up with boiling water, not cold, or the pudding sinks.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the right substitution.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses; it is the only leavening. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what these books meant, and get the batter into the mold promptly once the soda is mixed in.
- "Plenty of raisins"One to one and a half cups is in keeping with puddings of this type. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not all settle to the bottom of the mold.
- The moldThe batter comes to something like six to seven cups. Use a two-and-a-half to three-quart pudding basin or covered mold, buttered, filled no more than two-thirds; cover with a lid or a pleated sheet of buttered foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides.
- Testing and turning outA skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before unmolding or it will crack.
- The tartaric acidFood-grade tartaric acid is still sold for baking and winemaking. "A small lump" is vague; about an eighth of a teaspoon is enough to sharpen the sauce, and cream of tartar is a reasonable stand-in. Whisk the flour into the melted butter and sugar first, then add the boiling water gradually, or the sauce will be lumpy.
- YieldEight to ten servings. It reheats well; steam slices for ten minutes or cover and warm gently, and keep the sauce hot and pourable.
Steamed puddings like this one are American descendants of the English boiled pudding, adapted to the ingredients a nineteenth-century pantry held: molasses instead of sugar, soda instead of yeast or long beating, and whatever dried fruit was on hand. The spicing of cloves, cinnamon and allspice suits a cold-weather dish, and a three-hour steaming asked little of a range that was likely lit all day. The sauce is the more interesting half. A butter-and-sugar sauce sharpened with vinegar and tartaric acid and scented with lemon reads as a frugal cousin of a lemon sauce made with real fruit, and similar sauces appear in household books of the period. Tartaric acid was sold by druggists and used as a kitchen souring agent at a time when lemons were not always cheap or available.