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Quick Puff Pudding
Stir one pint flour, two tea-spoons baking powder, and a little salt into milk until very soft; place in steamer well-greased cups, put in each a spoonful of batter, then one of berries, steamed apples, or any sauce convenient, cover with another spoonful of batter and steam twenty minutes, This pudding is delicious made with fresh strawberries, and eaten with a sauce made of two eggs, half cup butter and cup of sugar, beaten thoroughly with a cup boiling milk and one of strawberries. - Mrs. B. T. Skinner, Battle Creek, Mich.
A steamed individual pudding built on a soft baking-powder batter, with fruit hidden in the middle. The whole thing hinges on batter consistency and a tightly covered steamer.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, that is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour. Two teaspoons of baking powder for that quantity is in line with modern practice.
- "Until very soft"No milk quantity is given because the cook was expected to judge it. Aim for a thick drop batter that falls heavily from the spoon rather than pouring, which will be somewhere near 1 cup of milk; add it gradually.
- Steamer cupsUse buttered 6 to 8 oz custard cups or ramekins, filled no more than two-thirds. Cover each with foil or a buttered round of parchment so condensation from the steamer lid does not drip in and waterlog the tops.
- Setting up the steamStand the cups on a rack over an inch or two of simmering water in a covered pot, the water kept below the rims. Keep it at a steady simmer, not a hard boil, and top up with boiling water if it runs low.
- Twenty minutesThat is right for cups this size; test with a skewer, which should come out clean. The puddings will look pale and matte rather than browned. Let them sit a minute before turning out.
- The fruit layerFresh berries, cooked apple or thick preserves all work. Anything very wet, such as loose canned fruit in syrup, will bleed into the batter, so drain it first.
- The sauceThis is a foaming custard sauce: beat the eggs, butter and sugar together, then pour in the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking. The original stops there; to be sure of the eggs, return the mixture to a low heat and stir until it reaches 160F and lightly coats a spoon, then fold in the cup of strawberries off the heat. Do not let it boil or it will curdle.
- YieldNo yield is given; on these quantities expect about six cups' worth, enough for six servings with sauce.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s and is a compilation book, its recipes signed by contributors from across the Midwest, as this one is by Mrs. B. T. Skinner of Battle Creek. Steamed puddings were the older tradition, inherited from English boiled and cloth-tied puddings, but the "quick" in the title marks the change under way: chemical leavening sold in tins had made it possible to raise a batter in twenty minutes without yeast, eggs, or long beating. Dividing the pudding among small cups rather than one large mold may well have been a further economy of time, and it is tempting to suppose it suited a stovetop steamer on a wood range better than a bread-loaf-sized pudding would, though the book itself does not say so. The strawberry sauce, thickened with egg and enriched with butter, is the sort of unnamed foamy sauce that appears throughout nineteenth-century American pudding chapters, made from whatever fruit the season had produced.