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Berry Pudding
One pint of flour, one-half teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons baking powder, two eggs, one cup of milk, two tablespoons of melted butter, and a pint of berries. Steam one hour.
— Mrs. Price H. Perry
A plain steamed batter pudding of the sort that turned a bowl of summer fruit into dinner's last course. The receipt assumes you know what a pudding mold is and how to rig a steamer, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Pint of flourMeasured by volume, a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour depending on how it was scooped. A pint of berries is likewise 2 cups, about 10 oz for blueberries and somewhat less for the lighter raspberries.
- The moldUse a 1.5- to 2-quart pudding basin, coffee can, or heatproof bowl, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds. The batter rises considerably and needs headroom; cover tightly with buttered foil or a cloth tied under the rim so condensation does not fall in.
- Setting up the steamerStand the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a steady low boil for the full hour. Check the water level at the halfway mark and top up with boiling, never cold, water.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups of flour to one cup of milk and two eggs gives a thick drop batter, not a pourable one. That is correct: a loose batter lets the fruit sink to the bottom.
- Keeping the berries suspendedToss the berries in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in at the last moment, and fold rather than stir. Overworking crushes them and stains the whole pudding purple.
- Testing for donenessAfter an hour a skewer into the center should come out clean of batter, though it will be wet with fruit juice. Let the pudding stand five minutes before unmolding or it may slump.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for two cups of flour is standard, then and now. Period baking powders were often single-acting, so the original cook worked quickly; modern double-acting powder gives you a little more latitude.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Steamed puddings of this kind were sent to table hot with a sweet sauce -- hard sauce, a thin lemon sauce, or simply cream -- as the batter itself carries no sugar at all.
Steamed puddings were the workhorse dessert of the nineteenth-century American kitchen: they needed no oven, which mattered enormously in summer when the range was already fighting the weather, and they could sit over a back burner while the rest of the meal was managed. This one belongs to the later, easier generation of the form, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast or the older soda-and-sour-milk pairing, which suggests a date after commercial baking powders became a pantry staple in the second half of the century. Berries picked in quantity through late summer, much of it wild, went into plain batters like this as the most direct way to use a day's gathering. The attribution to Mrs. Price H. Perry is characteristic of the community cookbook, a genre in which local churches and ladies' aid societies raised money by collecting their members' household receipts under the contributors' names.