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Graham Pudding
Mix 2 cups graham flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 teaspoon each cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg, 1 cup currants, 1 cup molasses, 1 egg well beaten, 1 cup milk, 2 teaspoons soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon hot water. Pour in Criscoed mold, cover with Criscoed paper and steam 3 hours. Turn out and serve with milk.
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the sort that filled out a weekday supper. Everything hinges on keeping the water at a steady low boil for the full three hours and never letting the pot run dry.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter is better tasting; "Criscoed mold" just means well greased. Two tablespoons is a lean amount of fat, which is why the pudding is dense rather than cakey.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, close to modern stone-ground whole wheat. Regular whole-wheat flour will do, though the crumb comes out slightly finer.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Rinse and dry them, or soak them briefly in hot water and drain, so they do not pull moisture from the batter.
- Soda and molassesTwo teaspoons of soda is only correct because a full cup of molasses supplies the acid. Do not substitute a neutral syrup, and do not increase the soda, or the pudding will taste soapy and turn a greenish grey.
- The moldA 2 quart pudding basin, coffee can or lidded steamed-pudding mold, filled no more than two-thirds. The greased paper cover, tied down, keeps condensation off the surface; foil, or paper under foil, does the same job.
- Steaming setupStand the mold on a rack or folded towel in a deep pot, add boiling water to reach halfway up the sides, cover, and hold it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; cold water stalls the cooking.
- DonenessAfter three hours a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides. Let it rest ten minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of four spices is four teaspoons in total, assertive by current standards. Cutting the cloves to half a teaspoon gives a more balanced result without changing the character.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. "Serve with milk" means cold milk poured over each warm portion; hard sauce or cream suits it as well.
Steamed graham puddings belong to the long American line of boiled and steamed molasses puddings that descend from English suet pudding, adapted by households that had molasses in the pantry and a coal range with a kettle already on it. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the temperance preacher and diet reformer of the 1830s whose advocacy of coarse unsifted wheat gave the flour, and later the cracker, his name; by the early twentieth century "graham" had lost its reforming edge and simply meant whole wheat on a grocer's shelf. The Crisco in the ingredient list places the page after 1911, when Procter & Gamble launched hydrogenated cottonseed shortening and issued recipe and menu books to teach cooks to reach for it instead of butter or lard.