Heat 1 large cup of milk and stir in 3 tablespoonfuls of butter; let boil up. Then stir in 1 small cup of flour sifted with 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder and a pinch of salt; stir until a smooth batter. Then remove from the fire and stir in 4 well-beaten eggs, ½ cup of preserved ginger minced fine and 2 tablespoonfuls of the syrup; mix thoroughly. Put into a well-buttered mold and let steam two hours. Serve hot with wine sauce.
A steamed pudding built on a cooked flour-and-butter panada, closer in method to choux paste than to a creamed batter. It works, but two details in the original will trip up anyone treating it as a cake.
- Cups and "large"/"small"Read the large cup of milk as a generous 8 oz (about 250 ml) and the small cup of flour as a scant 8 oz by volume, roughly 4 oz / 115 g by weight. Turn-of-the-century cup measures were not standardised; err toward slightly less flour, since the paste should be soft enough to fold eggs into.
- Cool the paste before the eggsThe original says only to remove it from the fire. Let the mixture stand off the heat until it is warm rather than hot, then beat the eggs in a little at a time; added to a paste straight off the boil they can curdle and leave the pudding grainy.
- The baking powder is nearly pointlessThe baking powder is a minor player -- Most of the lift here comes from the eggs and the steam, with the teaspoonful of baking-powder as insurance. Sift it in as directed, but do not increase it hoping for a lighter result.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars and still easy to find; the two tablespoons of syrup come from the same jar. Crystallised ginger is not a substitute without adding liquid, and fresh ginger is far too sharp at half a cup.
- Mold and steaming setupUse a 1½-quart pudding basin or mold, butter it well, and fill it no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or a lid, so condensation cannot drip in, and set it on a rack in a pot with simmering water reaching halfway up. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- DonenessTwo hours is right for that size, but check with a skewer at 1 hour 45 minutes: it should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Rest five minutes before turning out.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira thickened lightly, served warm and poured over. Sweetened whipped cream or a thin custard does the same job if you would rather skip the alcohol.
- YieldSix to eight servings. It is best eaten the day it is made; reheat leftovers by steaming again for 20 minutes rather than microwaving, which toughens the crumb.
Books of this kind — a dish a day, each pinned to a nation — appear to have been a fashion of roughly this period, and the geography was often more decorative than accurate. "Oriental" here does no work beyond signalling the ginger, which reached American and British kitchens chiefly as stem ginger preserved in syrup, much of it shipped from Canton and sold in the distinctive glazed stoneware jars that Victorian households kept long after the contents were gone. The pudding itself is thoroughly English in construction: a steamed pudding in a buttered mold, served hot with wine sauce, a form that dominated dessert courses through the nineteenth century because it needed no oven and could sit over the fire unattended. Dressing that familiar shape in an imported flavour and a foreign name is exactly what a book organised by nation had to do over and over.