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Steam Currant Pudding
3 tablespoons Cottolene. 1/2 cup sugar. 2½ cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 egg well beaten. 1 cup milk. 3½ teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 cup currants.
PROCESS: Mix and sift the dry ingredients (reserving two tablespoons flour), rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers. Sprinkle two tablespoons flour over cleaned currants, add to first mixture; add milk gradually, beat well and turn into a buttered mold; cover and steam two hours. Serve with Dried Apricot and Hard Sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort that filled out a Sunday dinner cheaply. Two points need attention before you start: the fat and the missing egg step.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, heavily advertised in this period and long discontinued. Use 3 tablespoons of vegetable shortening, lard or cold butter, rubbed in the same way.
- The eggThe ingredient list calls for one well-beaten egg but the method never says where it goes. Beat it into the milk and add the two together, gradually, as written.
- The baking powderThe printed page gives 3 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder to 2 1/2 cups of flour, which is what our text now reads. That is generous by modern standards; 2 1/2 to 3 teaspoons gives a less soapy result.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. "Cleaned" means picked over for stems and grit; a rinse and thorough drying is enough today. The reserved flour keeps them suspended rather than sunk.
- Mold and coveringA 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin or mold, buttered, filled no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, or the condensing steam will waterlog the top.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Check the level every 40 minutes and top up with boiling water. Two hours is right for this size; a skewer should come out clean.
- Turning out and servingRest 10 minutes before unmolding, or it may collapse. Serves six to eight. The dried apricot sauce and hard sauce called for appear elsewhere in the book; any fruit sauce with a butter-and-sugar hard sauce fills the same role.
Steamed puddings were the practical dessert of a coal-range kitchen: they needed no oven space on a day when the oven was busy with a roast, and they tolerated being forgotten for an hour. The tell here is Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company from the late nineteenth century as a cheaper, more "wholesome" replacement for lard. 52 Sunday Dinners was published as a promotional cookbook in which Cottolene appears throughout as the fat of choice, which is why a modest currant pudding opens with a branded ingredient rather than plain butter. The pudding itself belongs to the long English line of boiled and steamed currant puddings, lightened here with baking powder instead of the older suet-and-long-boiling method.