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Steamed Blueberry Pudding
2⅛ cups bread flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 tablespoons Cottolene. 1 cup milk. 1 cup blueberries.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers, add milk gradually, stirring constantly; turn on a floured board, knead slightly, then roll out to one-half inch thickness; place berries in center mixed with one-half teaspoon salt and two tablespoons sugar; fold dough over, pinch the edges together to form a large ball; lift carefully into a well-greased, two-quart pail, cover closely and steam one and one-half hours. Serve with 2 egg whites. 1 cup sugar.
A suet-free steamed dumpling of baking-powder dough wrapped around sweetened berries. The method is closer to an apple dumpling than to a batter pudding, and the dough must be handled lightly or it steams up tough.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the firm that issued this book. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening or lard; both rub into flour the same way.
- The flour quantity"21/8 cups" is a typesetting of 2 1/8 cups — about 265 g of bread flour. With one cup of milk that gives a soft, biscuit-like dough.
- Bread flourFlour of the period was not necessarily comparable to modern high-protein bread flour. All-purpose flour may give a more tender result; if you use modern bread flour, knead as briefly as the recipe says and no more.
- The two-quart pailA tin lard or syrup pail with a tight lid. A 2-quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl works; grease it well, cover with pleated foil or a tied cloth so condensation cannot drip in, and leave headroom for the dough to rise.
- How to steam itSet the covered pail on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a steady simmer for the full hour and a half. Check the water level twice and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- BerriesFresh blueberries release less liquid than frozen. If using frozen, add them still frozen and toss with a teaspoon of flour along with the sugar and salt, or the dough seam will soften and leak.
- The sauceThe trailing "2 egg whites, 1 cup sugar" is all the page gives for the sauce; the usual treatment is whites beaten stiff with the sugar and heaped over the hot pudding. As given it is uncooked, so use pasteurized whites, or beat the sugar in as a hot syrup to make a cooked meringue.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pudding of this size will serve about six. Turn it out whole and cut it into wedges at the table, serving it hot from the steamer.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the Chicago manufacturer of Cottolene, and its recipes call for that shortening by name — an example of the promotional cookbook, a form already well established by 1913, which put a branded product into a full year of menus rather than a single advertisement. Cottolene itself was a blend of cottonseed oil and beef stearin, dating from the later nineteenth century and marketed as a cheaper, lighter substitute for lard, and cookbooks like this one were among the means of teaching cooks to use it, alongside the company's print advertising. The pudding is older than the product: a boiled dumpling of dough folded around fruit belongs to the English tradition of pudding-cloth cookery, adapted here to the American tin pail and to chemical leavening instead of suet and long boiling. Blueberries suggest high summer, when the wild crop came in across New England and the Great Lakes.