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Pudding
One cup of molasses, one-half cup of butter, one cup of sweet milk, one teaspoon of soda, one teaspoon each of different spices, one-half cup of citron, one cup of chopped raisins, three and onehalf cups of flour, one-half cup of currants. Steam three hours. Sauce-One cup of milk, three-fourths cup of sugar, one egg, two tablespoons of flour, two tablespoons of water, vanilla to flavor.
— Mrs. C. V. Post
A steamed molasses fruit pudding of the plainest village sort, with a cornstarch-style egg sauce. The original assumes you know what a pudding mold is and how to keep a kettle at a simmer for three hours.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which many recipes of the period called for instead. Do not substitute buttermilk here: the soda is already paired with the acidity of the molasses.
- "One teaspoon each of different spices"Read this as a teaspoon apiece of two or three warm spices, not of everything in the cupboard. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice were the usual set in nineteenth-century American baking; three teaspoons total is plenty for this amount of flour.
- Citron and currantsCitron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks at holiday time and easily replaced with candied orange or lemon peel. Currants are the small dried Zante grapes, not fresh red currants; dust the citron, currants and raisins with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse ordinary unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what was sold as molasses in a village grocery and will overwhelm the fruit.
- The moldYou need roughly a 2-quart pudding mold or basin, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds, since the soda gives a real rise. Cover tightly with a lid or with buttered parchment and foil tied down, or condensing steam will waterlog the top.
- Steaming for three hoursSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep the water at a steady simmer, topping up with boiling water as it drops. The three hours is not padding: it is what a dense molasses batter needs, and it is forgiving of an extra fifteen minutes. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the surface springs back.
- The sauceWhisk the flour smooth with the two tablespoons of water, stir into the scalded milk and sugar, and cook until it thickens. Then temper the beaten egg with a little of the hot mixture before returning it to the pan and cooking gently just until it coats a spoon; a hard boil after the egg goes in will curdle it. Flavor with vanilla off the heat.
- Yield and servingEnough for roughly eight to ten servings, though the original gives no yield. Unmold while hot, and serve the sauce warm over each portion. Leftover pudding reheats well by steaming for twenty minutes.
Steamed puddings like this one belong to the long English tradition that traveled intact into American kitchens: a boiled or steamed batter, richly spiced and studded with dried fruit, that could be cooked over the same fire already burning for the rest of dinner and required no oven at all. Molasses is the tell of a modest household. It was cheaper than refined sugar throughout the nineteenth century, and paired with saleratus or soda it did double duty as sweetener and leavening acid. The candied citron, on the other hand, was a small extravagance, which places this pudding at a holiday or Sunday table rather than a weeknight one. Community cookbooks such as this one, assembled from members' contributions, preserve exactly this kind of receipt: a dish confident enough of its audience to say "one teaspoon each of different spices" and trust the cook to know which ones she kept.