Cherry Duff
4 cups pitted cherries.. 2 cups sugar. 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 1 1/2 tablespoons Cottolene. 2 cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt. 3/4 cup milk or thin cream.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; rub Cottolene in lightly with the tips of fingers; add milk and mix to soft dough. Put sugar, cherries, drained from juice, and lemon juice in bottom of well-greased baking dish. Cover with dough, place in steamer, set over kettle of boiling water, lay a crash towel over steamer, replace cover, and steam pudding forty-five minutes. Serve with cherry juice, thickened with arrow root and sweetened. Y
A steamed cobbler-style pudding: sweetened cherries under a biscuit crust, cooked over water rather than in the oven. Nothing here is difficult, but two things in the original need translating before you start.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which paid for this book. Substitute butter or vegetable shortening in the same amount.
- The fat quantity is garbledThe fat quantity looks defective -- "1/2 tablespoons Cottolene" is probably a truncated figure (1 1/2 is the likeliest reading) and half a tablespoon for two cups of flour would be very little. A biscuit dough of this size is usually made with a few tablespoons of fat; use judgment rather than the printed figure.
- Crash towelCrash is a coarse, loosely woven linen. Its job is to absorb condensation so drips do not fall back onto the crust and make it sodden. A clean tea towel laid over the pot and under the lid does the same thing; keep the edges clear of the burner.
- Steaming setupA perforated steamer insert or a rack set over an inch of boiling water in a deep pot with a tight lid. Keep the water at a steady boil for the full 45 minutes and top it up with boiling water if it runs low — the pudding stops cooking if the steam stops.
- DonenessForty-five minutes is right for a shallow dish. The crust should be dry to the touch and spring back; a skewer into the dough (not the fruit) comes out clean. Steamed dough stays pale, so do not wait for browning.
- The drained juiceThe recipe puts the cherries in drained of their juice, and that reserved juice becomes the sauce, thickened with arrowroot. Draining keeps the underside of the crust from turning to paste. Allow roughly 1 teaspoon arrowroot per cup of juice, stirred in off the boil; arrowroot thins if it is boiled hard.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar assumes sour cherries. With sweet dark cherries, cut it by at least a third or the pudding is cloying.
- YieldProbably six to eight servings on this quantity, spooned out warm with the sauce; the book gives no figure. Best eaten freshly steamed.
A "duff" is simply a dialect pronunciation of "dough," and the word travelled with sailors — plum duff, a boiled flour pudding with raisins, was standard shipboard fare in the nineteenth century, since a pudding could be cooked in the same copper as everything else without an oven. By the time this book appeared, the name had come ashore and attached itself to any steamed dough-and-fruit pudding, cherries included. 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening promoted as a cleaner, more modern substitute for lard, and the product is named throughout; the book is as much an advertisement as a cookbook, which was a common arrangement for American manufacturers in the period.