Mix ½ pound of butter with ½ pound of powdered sugar to a cream. Add the yolks of 6 eggs beaten, ½ cup of seeded raisins and some chopped citron, a pinch of nutmeg and cinnamon. Mix in ½ pound of sifted flour and ½ teaspoonful of baking-powder. Add the whites, beaten to a stiff froth; put in a buttered pudding-mold, and let boil until done. Serve with brandy sauce.
A rich creamed-butter pudding steamed in a mold rather than baked — the sort of thing an American cookbook of 1900 filed under "English" without further comment. The original gives weights, not cups, and no time at all, which is where most of the work of translation lies.
- The weights½ pound butter is 2 sticks (225 g); ½ pound sugar is about 1 to 1¼ cups if it is the finely ground granulated sort (see below), nearer 1¾ cups if you measure modern confectioners' sugar; ½ pound sifted flour is about 1¾ cups. Weigh if you can — the flour figure in particular swings by a quarter-cup depending on how it is scooped.
- "Let boil until done"The mold sits in a covered pot with water coming halfway up its side, at a bare simmer, for about 2 to 2½ hours. The water must never boil hard enough to slop over the lid, and it needs topping up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Filling the moldButter it generously and fill only two-thirds. Batter with beaten whites and baking powder in it will climb, and a full mold will push its lid off and take on water. Cover with the lid or with buttered foil tied down.
- Testing itA skewer into the center should come out clean, and the pudding will have pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand five to ten minutes before unmolding or it may slump.
- CitronCandied citron peel — a thick, pale, faintly bitter candied rind, not the lemon-like fresh fruit and not the same as mixed peel, though mixed candied peel is the usual modern substitute. Two ounces, chopped small, suits this quantity.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar creams closest to what was intended.
- Folding the whitesSix whites beaten stiff are the only real lift here — the ½ teaspoon of baking powder is insurance. Fold them in last, in two additions, and get the pudding into the mold and over the water promptly.
- Brandy sauceThe book assumes you know it. Two readings were current: a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar beaten with brandy, served cold against the hot pudding, or a warm sauce thickened with cornstarch or egg yolk and finished with brandy off the heat.
- YieldA 1½- to 2-quart mold, serving eight. It keeps several days wrapped, and reheats by steaming for 20 to 30 minutes.
Boiled and steamed puddings were the backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, first tied in a floured cloth and dropped into the pot alongside the meat, later — once tinned and enameled molds became cheap in the nineteenth century — set in a covered basin over simmering water. This one is a plain-cake batter treated as a pudding: creamed butter and sugar, separated eggs, a little dried fruit and candied citron, spice enough to be noticed and not enough to be a plum pudding. The half-teaspoon of baking powder is the modern intrusion, a chemical leavener doing quietly what beaten egg whites alone once had to do; commercial baking powder was widely sold in American kitchens by the 1870s and had worked its way into recipes of every nationality by the time books like this were compiled. The daily-dish format — one country per calendar date, English pudding on the 22nd and German brains on the 23rd — was a popular publishing conceit of the period, promising the housekeeper a year's worth of variety without her ever having to decide anything.