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Thanksgiving Pudding
1/2 cup Cottolene creamed. 1/4 teaspoon cloves. 1 cup molasses. 1 cup buttermilk. 3 cups flour. 1 teaspoon soda. 11/½ teaspoons salt. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoon allspice. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. 1½ cups seeded and shredded raisins. 3/4 cup currants. 3 tablespoons flour for dredging fruit.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene. Add molasses and milk. Sift flour, soda, salt and spices together; add gradually to first mixture; beat thoroughly. Mix raisins and currants; dredge them with flour and add to batter; mix well. Turn into a well-buttered tube mold; fill two-thirds full; place on buttered cover; set on trivet; surround with boiling water and steam three hours. Serve with
A steamed molasses-and-fruit pudding of the plainer American sort — no suet, no brandy, and leavened with soda against buttermilk rather than eggs. The text breaks off mid-sentence at the sauce, so that choice is yours.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, heavily advertised in this period and long discontinued. Use 1/2 cup vegetable shortening, or butter if you want more flavour; "creamed" here just means beaten soft and smooth before the liquids go in.
- The garbled salt"11/½ teaspoons salt" is a typesetting muddle. The same page prints "11/2 cups" of raisins for 1 1/2 cups, so the intended figure is probably 1 1/2 teaspoons; that is on the salty side for this batter, and anything from 1/2 to 1 teaspoon works. Do not take it as eleven.
- Soda and buttermilkThis is the hinge. The soda reacts with the buttermilk and the acid in the molasses, so get the batter into the mould and over the heat promptly rather than letting it stand while you find the trivet.
- Dredging the fruitThe 3 tablespoons of flour tossed with the raisins and currants keep them suspended instead of sinking to the bottom of the mould. Use flour from the measured 3 cups, or accept a slightly stiffer pudding.
- The mould and the waterA tube mould with a lid, filled two-thirds full to allow rise; butter the underside of the cover as well, as directed. Set it on a trivet in a deep pot and bring the water to roughly halfway up the mould, kept at a steady simmer and topped up with boiling water as it drops.
- TimingThree hours is right for a pudding of this density; steamed batter cooks slowly and does not brown or dry out. Test with a skewer into the thickest part. It reheats well by re-steaming for 30 to 40 minutes.
- Sauce and yieldThe recipe is cut off at "Serve with" — a hard sauce (butter creamed with powdered sugar), a foamy egg sauce or a lemon sauce all suit a molasses pudding. The batter comes to about 1 1/2 quarts, so at two-thirds full you want a mould of 2 1/2 quarts or so; it should serve eight or more.
Steamed puddings like this one are the thrifty American descendants of English boiled plum pudding: the dried fruit and warm spices remain, but suet gives way to shortening, brandy to buttermilk, and the pudding cloth to a tin tube mould with a buttered cover. That Cottolene is named as an ingredient rather than simply "shortening" places the book squarely in its moment — 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the makers of Cottolene, and the product appears throughout as a matter of course. Cottonseed oil shortening was marketed hard in the 1890s and 1900s as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to lard, and household cookbooks issued by the manufacturers were one of the main ways cooks were persuaded to try it.