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Steamed Snow Balls (Cup Cottolene cup fine sugar)
1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup fine sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 2½ cups pastry flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder.
Whites 4 eggs beaten until stiff. ½ teaspoon salt. ½ teaspoon orange extract.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture alternately with milk. Add extract. Cut and fold in whites of eggs. Fill buttered pop-over cups two-thirds full, place in steamer, cover steamer with a folded crash tea towel, cover closely and steam forty-five minutes. Serve with orange sauce or in nests of Whipped Cream, sweetened and flavored with Vanilla.
EDITORS NOTE:
This will also be found a very acceptable menu for a Christmas Dinner.
A steamed white cake, essentially a snow-white butter cake batter cooked over water rather than in the oven, so it stays pale and damp. Two of the printed quantities are almost certainly typographical.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, discontinued long ago; this book was published by its maker as advertising for it. Use 1/3 cup vegetable shortening, or butter if you prefer the flavour, creamed the same way.
- The salt and extract figuresThe printed page was checked: both figures are half a teaspoon, as our text now gives. Half a teaspoon of orange extract is enough to flavor the batter without bitterness, and half a teaspoon of salt suits this quantity of flour.
- Pastry flourLower-protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute cake flour, or replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or the crumb is likely to be tougher under steam.
- Popover cups in a steamerAny straight-sided heatproof cups or a metal muffin tin will do, set on a rack above simmering — not boiling — water in a covered pot. Butter them well and fill only two-thirds, as the batter climbs.
- The crash tea towelCrash is a coarse loose-woven linen. Its job is to catch condensation off the lid so drips do not pit the cakes; a folded flour-sack towel under the lid does the same, kept clear of the water and tucked well away from any flame.
- Steaming timeForty-five minutes is right for full-size popover cups; smaller cups will need proportionately less. Test with a skewer, and keep the water at a bare simmer throughout.
- Egg whitesBeaten stiff but not dry, and folded in last with a light hand. They are the only lift beyond the baking powder, and steam gives no oven spring to rescue a deflated batter.
- Yield and servingAbout ten to twelve cakes. Serve warm, either with an orange sauce or in nests of sweetened whipped cream, as directed; they firm and dry noticeably once cold.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller for the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-suet shortening sold from the 1890s as a cheaper, more "wholesome" rival to lard -- which is why the fat is named by brand rather than described generically. Steamed puddings and cakes were still common in that era's kitchens: a coal range gave uneven oven heat, while a pot of simmering water gave a gentler, moist environment, and it kept a white batter white. The name appears to be descriptive rather than regional -- pale domed cakes, doubled up as snowballs by way of whipped cream -- and similar cakes appear in period books as snowballs or steamed white cake. The editor's note recommending it for Christmas dinner reflects the book's structure: a year of complete Sunday menus, one per week.