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Estelle Pudding
Three eggs well beaten, two and a half table-spoons sugar, two of butter, three-fourths cup sweet milk, one of raisins chopped fine, one table-spoon baking powder, flour to make it the consistency of cake batter; or, one-half measure each of Horsford's Bread Preparation and one coffee-cup flour; steam thirty-five minutes, and serve with cold cream sauce. - Mrs. Andrew Wilson, Rye, N. Y.
A quick steamed batter pudding of the kind that filled out a mid-week dinner. The recipe assumes you know how to rig a steamer and how thick cake batter should be, so most of the work is in the details it leaves out.
- The hinge: batter consistencyFlour is given only as "enough," so the batter is the control. The recipe's second option pairs these wet ingredients with one coffee-cup of flour, so about a cup, give or take, should bring it to a thick, spoon-droppable cake batter. Too slack and the raisins sink; too stiff and steam cannot open the crumb.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for ordinary fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA two-part leavener sold by the Rumford Chemical Works: an acid phosphate powder and a soda powder, packaged separately and combined at mixing. It is long gone; the recipe's own first option, one tablespoon of baking powder, is the working version.
- That much baking powderA tablespoon for roughly a cup to a cup and a half of flour is about double modern practice, though period powders were single-acting and behaved differently in the pot. Two teaspoons is nearer modern taste, and a full tablespoon may leave a faint chemical aftertaste.
- Coffee-cupGenerally reckoned at about a cup, sometimes a little more; a teacup is usually taken as smaller, in the region of three-quarters of a cup. Both are approximations rather than fixed measures.
- Steaming setupButter individual moulds or custard cups, fill two-thirds, cover each with buttered paper or foil, and set on a rack over simmering water in a covered pot. Thirty-five minutes suits small moulds; one large mould of this batter needs closer to an hour and a quarter, tested with a skewer.
- Cold cream sauceNot a cooked sauce. One common period form is butter creamed with powdered sugar and thinned with cream and a little vanilla or nutmeg, served cold against the hot pudding. Allow about a cup for this quantity.
- YieldFour to six servings, or six small moulds. Best turned out and eaten within the hour; steamed puddings stiffen as they cool but reheat well in the steamer.
Steamed puddings of this sort — egg, milk, flour, a chemical leaven and dried fruit, cooked over water rather than in an oven — were the everyday descendants of the boiled cloth puddings of British cookery, adapted, it is often said, for the American range where a covered kettle was readily available and oven heat less so. Horsford's Bread Preparation appears as an alternative to baking powder, a product of the Rumford Chemical Works of Rumford, in East Providence, Rhode Island, which promoted its phosphate leaveners heavily through the 1870s and 1880s. Like much of Buckeye Cookery, the recipe arrives credited to a named contributor in a distant town — Rye, New York, well outside Ohio — a reminder that these compilations circulated by correspondence and that a pudding named for someone's Estelle could travel further than she did.