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Bellevue Pudding
One cup (scant) molasses, one-half cup butter, one cup sweet milk, one teaspoon soda dissolved in milk, one teaspoon cinnamon, one-half teaspoon cloves, two cups flour. Steam two and one-half hours.
Sauce One cup sugar, one-half cup butter, one egg beaten separately, one tablespoon vanilla, two tablespoons hot water just before serving.
— Miss Charlotte T. Dubois
— Mrs. P. H. Cole
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the sort that needed no oven, served hot with a foamy butter sauce. The original assumes you know how to rig a steamer and how thick the batter should be.
- Set up the steam bath firstGrease a 1½–2 quart pudding mold or a straight-sided metal bowl, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover it tightly with a lid or a doubled sheet of foil tied down. Stand it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping it up with boiling water as it goes. A hard boil can drive water in around the cover and leave the pudding sodden.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk. The term distinguished it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older receipts often called for, which changes how much soda is needed.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it works against the acid in the molasses. Use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is harsher and more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Mix and get the pudding into the steam promptly.
- Butter and flour amountsHalf a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz.
- Two and a half hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one stands. A dense batter in a covered mold heats slowly, and understeaming leaves a gummy core. Test with a skewer through the center; it should come out clean and the pudding pull slightly from the sides.
- The sauce"One egg beaten separately" means yolk and white beaten apart: cream the butter and sugar, work in the yolk, fold in the stiffly beaten white, then loosen with the vanilla and hot water just before it goes to the table. A tablespoon of vanilla is a great deal by modern standards; a teaspoon or two suits current extracts.
- Raw egg in the sauceThe sauce is never cooked, and two tablespoons of hot water will not bring an egg to a safe temperature. Use pasteurized shell eggs if serving it uncooked, particularly to children or anyone with a compromised immune system.
- YieldServes six to eight. Turn the pudding out hot; leftovers reheat well with a few minutes back in the steamer.
Steamed puddings held on in American household cookery long after the brick oven gave way to the range, because they asked nothing of the oven at all — only a covered pot and a slow fire, which a kitchen kept going anyway. Molasses did the sweetening: through much of the nineteenth century it was generally cheaper than refined sugar in the Northeast, and a molasses-and-spice pudding with a butter sauce stood as an everyday counterpart to the richer fruited puddings brought out at Christmas. The name Bellevue is not explained in the book and may simply be local — community receipt collections often attached a place, a house or a hotel name to an otherwise standard formula. The two contributors' names printed together may mean the same receipt reached the compilers twice, though it could equally be a joint contribution.