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Steamed Pudding
Three cupfuls flour, one cup sugar, one cup milk, one egg, two tablespoonfuls melted butter, two and one half teaspoonfuls baking powder, one cupful cherries, currants, or raisins, a little salt. Steam three hours.
A plain baking-powder steamed pudding of the sort that lived on the back of the stove all afternoon. The proportions as printed give a very stiff batter, which is worth knowing before you start.
- The batter is drier than you expectThree cups of flour to one cup of milk and one egg produces a thick, almost dough-like mass rather than a pourable batter. If you want it slacker, add milk a tablespoon at a time until it drops heavily from the spoon.
- VesselUse a pudding basin, mold or coffee can of at least two quarts, well buttered, filled no more than two-thirds so the pudding can rise. Cover tightly with buttered foil or a floured cloth tied under the rim, or condensation will drip in and make the top sodden.
- How to steamSet the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; letting the pot run dry is the usual way these puddings are ruined.
- Three hours is longThree hours suits a suet or brown-bread pudding. A chemically leavened batter this size is done in about two hours, and often in ninety minutes for a smaller mold. Test with a skewer to the center.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons for three cups of flour is a little under the modern rule of thumb of about a teaspoon per cup. Get the pudding into the steam promptly after mixing.
- The fruitCurrants here means dried currants, not fresh. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink, and if using raisins or dried cherries, plump them in hot water first and drain well.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Unmold hot and serve with a sweet hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon sauce, or simply cream. Leftovers reheat well in the steamer, sliced.
Steamed puddings were a practical answer to an unreliable oven: a pot of simmering water holds a steady temperature no coal range could match, and the moist heat forgives inattention. Britain's suet-and-cloth boiled puddings are the ancestors, but American recipes of the late nineteenth century increasingly swapped suet for butter and yeast or long beating for baking powder, which is exactly what this one does. The result is closer to a moist steamed cake than to a Christmas pudding, and the alternatives offered in the ingredient list, cherries, currants, or raisins, show how such recipes worked in practice: a fixed frame filled with whatever fruit the pantry held.