Home › Puddings › Molasses Sponge Pudding
Molasses Sponge Pudding
2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful molasses 1 egg 1 tablespoonful breadcrumbs 3/4 cupful milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt
For Sauce (Teaspoonful Crisco teaspoonful)
1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 teaspoonful cornstarch 2 tablespoonfuls lemon juice 3 tablespoonfuls molasses 1 cupful hot water For pudding. Mix flour, breadcrumbs, soda and ginger together, then rub in Crisco with finger tips. Beat egg, add milk, molasses, salt and stir into dry ingredients. Turn mixture into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam steadily for two hours. Turn out and serve with sauce. For sauce. Blend Crisco and cornstarch together, add molasses, water, and lemon juice, and boil a few minutes.
This entry gives quantities only — the method lived in the book's general directions for puddings. The ingredient ratios point clearly to a steamed or baked ginger pudding, and the notes below cover what the list leaves unsaid.
- The missing methodCream the Crisco, beat in molasses and egg, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk. The batter should be pourable, roughly like a thick cake batter.
- What the breadcrumbs are forOne tablespoon is too little to do much binding or thickening. It may have been intended to dust the greased pudding basin or mold, giving the batter something to climb and helping it turn out cleanly, though the list itself gives no indication.
- CriscoCrisco in 1915 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a solid white shortening. Any modern vegetable shortening works, measured solid and at room temperature; butter gives more flavor and a slightly firmer crumb.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much less sweet. Note that molasses is the only sweetener here — the pudding is meant to be dark and mildly sweet, not sugary.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda for half a cup of molasses is the working leavening; the acid in the molasses activates it. Get the batter into the mold and into the heat promptly, since the rise begins immediately.
- SteamingFill a greased 1.5-quart basin no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with foil or a floured cloth, and steam in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides for about 2 hours. Top up with boiling water as needed.
- If baking insteadPoured into a buttered dish, it bakes at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Baked, it is drier and more cake-like; steamed, it is the true "sponge pudding."
- Yield and servingServes six. It expects a sauce — hard sauce, a thin lemon sauce, or plain cream — and reheats well by steaming again for 20 minutes.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional cookery for Crisco, which had gone on the market in 1911; the recipes call for the shortening by name throughout, which is why a traditional English pudding turns up here with a branded fat instead of the suet or butter it would once have used. The dish itself belongs to the long line of steamed molasses-and-ginger puddings that came to American kitchens from Britain, where treacle and ground ginger were the cheap, keepable sweetening and spice of a winter larder. "Sponge" here appears to describe the texture a chemically leavened batter gives when steamed rather than boiled in a cloth — lighter than the older suet puddings.