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Whortleberry Pudding
One quart berries, pint molasses, cup milk, tea-spoon soda, one pound and two ounces flour, one tea-spoon cloves, one of cinnamon, and one nutmeg; boil two and a half hours. -Mrs. Emma Fay.
A boiled (steamed) pudding of the old school: no eggs, no butter, leavened only by the reaction of molasses and soda. The instructions assume you already know how to tie up a pudding cloth or fill a mould, so most of the work of translation is in the vessel and the method.
- WhortleberriesAn old British and New England name applied loosely to huckleberries and wild blueberries. Cultivated blueberries are the practical substitute; they are juicier and a little sweeter, so expect a wetter batter than the original would have given.
- The flour weightOne pound two ounces is 18 oz, roughly 4 to 4 1/4 cups of modern all-purpose flour. Weigh it if you can — the ratio of flour to liquid is the whole structure of this pudding, and period cup equivalences for flour do not reliably match modern ones.
- Molasses and sodaThe pint of molasses is both sweetener and acid; the teaspoon of soda reacts with it for lift. Use unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spices. Mix the soda into the molasses and add last, then get the pudding into the pot promptly.
- "Boil two and a half hours"A cloth-tied pudding of this date was often boiled fully immersed, but a covered mould set over water is the easier modern route. This quantity of batter runs to some ten or eleven cups, so use a well-greased mould of at least three quarts, filled two-thirds full, covered tightly with pleated foil or a tied cloth, and set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up from a kettle so it never runs dry.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg yields something like two to three teaspoons — assertive by modern standards and typical of the period. One teaspoon freshly grated is closer to current taste, alongside the teaspoon each of cloves and cinnamon.
- No fat, no eggsThe result is dense, dark and chewy rather than cakey, and it will taste better the day after. A suet or butter-enriched pudding it is not; do not judge it against a modern steamed sponge.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Buckeye Cookery carries a range of pudding sauces that would suit it — a hard sauce of butter and sugar, or a thin sweet sauce poured over each slice while the pudding is hot — though this recipe specifies none.
"Whortleberry" is an English dialect word, a cousin of "hurtleberry," and the American "huckleberry" is generally thought to derive from it, though the descent is not certain; in nineteenth-century American cookbooks the name was used freely for small dark wild berries. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in 1877 at Marysville, Ohio, and later issued from Minneapolis, was assembled from contributions by named housewives — Mrs. Emma Fay here among them — and is full of such boiled puddings. They cook on the stovetop rather than in the oven, and molasses was generally cheaper than refined sugar and needed no eggs or butter to make a filling sweet. The style descends from British boiled puddings, adapted to American berries and American molasses.