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Steam Pudding
One pint of sifted flour, one egg, one cup of milk, one-half cup of sugar, two teaspoons of baking powder, two tablespoons of melted butter. Steam one-half hour.
Sauce-One cup of powdered sugar, one-half cup of butter, Beat to a cream and add any kind of fruit.
— Mrs. Charles F. Dunn
one egg.
A plain batter pudding of the kind that once lived on the back of every stove, served with a creamed hard sauce. The text as printed is garbled at the end: the stray "one egg" belongs to the sauce, not to the pudding.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in the cup or pint measure, so a pint of sifted flour is 2 cups, roughly 8 oz. Sift before measuring, as directed, or the batter will be stiff.
- The batterIt is a thick drop batter, not a pourable one. Beat the egg with the milk and sugar, add the melted butter, then fold in the flour and baking powder just until combined; overworking gives a tough, rubbery pudding.
- Setting up the steamerButter a mold or pudding basin big enough that the batter fills it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops.
- Half an hour is optimisticThirty minutes is likely to be short for anything larger than small individual cups; a full-sized mold will probably need considerably longer. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and let it stand five minutes before turning out.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally means finely ground sugar rather than the modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Either works here; confectioners' sugar creams smoothest.
- Raw egg in the sauceIf the stray "one egg" does belong here, the sauce is butter, sugar, egg and fruit beaten together and never cooked. In that case use pasteurized eggs, or leave the egg out entirely and beat in a spoonful of cream instead ut a a little volume.
- "Any kind of fruit"The recipe leaves it open; crushed berries or chopped preserved fruit suit it. Add the fruit last and only a few tablespoons at a time, or the sauce breaks and weeps.
- YieldServes four to six, warm, with the sauce spooned on so it melts into the cut surface.
Steamed puddings survived in American home cooking long after the open hearth disappeared because they asked so little: no oven, and a covered pot over an existing fire. This one belongs to the simplest branch of the family — no suet, no dried fruit, no long boiling — a quick baking-powder batter that owes more to cake than to the old English boiled pudding, and that is generally thought to have become possible only after chemical leavening reached ordinary kitchens around the middle of the nineteenth century. The creamed butter-and-sugar sauce is what was generally called hard sauce, a name variously explained by its firm set and by the spirits in it. The attribution to Mrs. Charles F. Dunn is typical of community cookbooks of this sort; the compression, the missing steps and the misplaced "one egg" at the end are all marks of receipts set in type straight from the contributor's own shorthand.