Cup Pudding
Take one cupful of wheat flour, one cup of sweet milk, three quarters of a cup of sugar, half a cup of butter and three eggs. Stir the butter and sugar together; beat the eggs thoroughly, mix with the flour one tea-spoonful and one half of baking powder, and stir the milk and eggs into it, with the butter and sugar beaten to a cream, butter some tea cups or small dishes, put raspberry jam, or preserved peaches at the bottom of the cup and fill half full with the batter, and steam for twenty minutes. Serve with a rich sauce.
A simple steamed sponge baked in individual cups over jam — quick to assemble, but the steaming setup is where the recipe assumes knowledge it does not spell out.
- The hinge: a covered, gentle steamButter the cups, cover each with a square of foil or buttered parchment tied on, and stand them in a pot with simmering water reaching halfway up their sides. Condensation dripping into an uncovered cup gives a soaked, dense top.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often call for. No sugar is implied.
- Cup sizeThe nineteenth-century kitchen cup is close enough to 8 fl oz to use a modern measuring cup. Half a cup of butter is 4 oz, one stick.
- Baking powderA teaspoon and a half to one cup of flour is on the generous side by modern standards but works, and modern double-acting powder is fine. Mix it through the flour dry, as directed, rather than adding it to the wet batter.
- VesselsTeacups of the period were small, roughly 5 to 6 fl oz. Use ramekins, dariole moulds or heatproof cups of that size, and heed the instruction to fill only half full — the batter climbs.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits genuinely small cups. At 6 fl oz allow 25 to 30 minutes, and test with a skewer through the sponge, avoiding the jam layer, which stays loose and hot.
- Turning outRest the cups two or three minutes, then invert onto plates so the jam runs down over the sponge. Straight from the steamer they slump.
- The "rich sauce"Period practice means a sweet pudding sauce — a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar, a thin custard, or butter, sugar and cream cooked briefly together. Any of these still works.
- YieldAbout eight to ten small puddings.
Steamed individual puddings like this one belong to the long English tradition that came to America intact: batter or suet mixture cooked in a covered basin over water rather than in an oven, a method that predates reliable domestic ovens and outlasted them because it produces a moist, forgiving sponge. The jam or preserved fruit spooned into the bottom of the cup ends up on top when the pudding is inverted, glazing it without a separate sauce. The call for "a rich sauce" without a formula is characteristic of such books: the sauce was treated as common knowledge. The use of baking powder rather than beaten eggs alone for lift suggests a date in the second half of the nineteenth century, after chemical leaveners became widely available in American households.