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Pear Pudding
Six pears peeled and sliced, one-half cup of raisins, one-half cup of water, one-half cup of sugar. Cook in a well-covered kettle until it boils, then drop in by the tablespoonful the following dough: One and one-half cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, two tablespoons of sugar, one tablespoon of butter, and milk enough to make a soft dough.
— Mrs. William Dunning
This is a stovetop fruit pudding with steamed dumplings — the family that includes grunts, slumps and cobblers cooked on the range rather than in the oven. The method depends entirely on trapped steam, so the lid is the whole recipe.
- Keep the lid onOnce the dough goes in, cover the pot and leave it alone. The recipe gives no time, but dumplings of this size generally want somewhere in the region of fifteen minutes. Lifting the lid releases the steam that cooks the tops of the dumplings, and they may collapse into pale, doughy lumps.
- "Kettle" means saucepanIn this period a kettle is any deep, lidded stovetop pot, not a tea kettle. A 3- to 4-quart heavy pan with a tight lid is right; the pears should sit no more than about two inches deep so the dumplings rest on fruit rather than sink.
- Choose firm pearsBosc or Anjou hold their shape through simmering. Very ripe Bartletts will break down into sauce in a few minutes, which is not fatal but gives you a different pudding.
- Half a cup of water is not a typoThe pears release a good deal of juice as they heat. Add more only if the pan looks dry before it comes to a boil, and keep the heat low once the dumplings are in — a hard boil scorches the fruit under a sealed lid.
- Milk enough for a soft doughReckon on about 1/2 to 2/3 cup. The dough should drop reluctantly from a spoon, wetter than biscuit dough and stiffer than batter. Mix it only until it comes together.
- Baking powderMuch of the baking powder sold in this period was single-acting, so speed mattered; modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the dough should still go into the pot as soon as it is mixed.
- Testing and yieldA skewer into the centre of a dumpling should come out clean and the surface should look dry and set, not glossy. This feeds four to six, and wants cream or a thin custard poured over it while hot.
Puddings of this shape — fruit stewed in a covered pot with spoonfuls of leavened dough dropped on top — were a familiar sweet dish in nineteenth-century American farm kitchens, because they needed no oven and no more fuel than an ordinary simmer. New England names for the type, grunt and slump, are usually explained as onomatopoeia for the sound of the fruit bubbling under the lid, though that account is traditional rather than documented. Pears suited the method well, since long moist cooking with sugar and raisins was the way firm fruit was made palatable. That this appears among the "Village Receipts" over a contributor's name is characteristic of the community cookbook, a form that flourished in the late 1800s and early 1900s as church and civic groups gathered neighbours' everyday dishes and sold the printed results to raise funds.