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Steamed Chocolate Pudding
One egg, one-half cup of sugar, two teaspoons of butter, one cup of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, one and one-half squares of melted chocolate, one-half cup of milk. Steam one and one-half hours. Serve with hard sauce.
— Mrs. Addison P. Jones
A small, plain steamed pudding of the kind a village cook could put on at the start of dinner and forget about. The ingredient list is terse even by 1900 standards, so a few things need pinning down.
- Squares of chocolateA square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for an ounce and a half, melted and cooled slightly before it goes in. Modern bars are not always scored to the same unit — weigh rather than count.
- The butter looks wrong but isn'tTwo teaspoons is genuinely all the fat here; the pudding leans on the cocoa butter in the chocolate. It produces a light, cakey, faintly dry crumb, which is exactly why hard sauce is compulsory rather than optional.
- Mixing orderNo method is given. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the melted chocolate, and add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. The batter will be thick enough to drop from a spoon, not pour.
- The mouldButter a one-quart pudding basin or mould and fill it no more than two-thirds; the baking powder needs headroom. Cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or the mould's lid, so condensate cannot drip in and make the top sodden.
- Steaming setupStand the mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Check the level every half hour and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- Ninety minutes is realA leavened steamed pudding cooks slowly at 212F and the full hour and a half is not padding. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding has pulled slightly from the sides. Rest ten minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce: butter beaten with one to two times its weight in sifted confectioners' sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or rum, then chilled firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldFour to six small servings. It is a modest family pudding, not a company dessert, and it doubles cleanly if you use a two-quart mould and add roughly half an hour.
Steamed puddings held on in American home cooking partly because they suited coal and wood ranges: once the pot was set at a simmer it needed nothing but an occasional kettle of boiling water, and it did not compete for oven space with the roast. Chocolate versions belong to the later nineteenth century, when Baker's and similar firms sold unsweetened chocolate in cakes scored into squares — the "square" of these receipts is a manufacturer's unit, not a cook's guess. Community cookbooks of this sort, printed with each contributor's name attached, assumed a shared body of knowledge: Mrs. Jones did not need to say how to cream butter or rig a steamer, only what made her pudding hers. Hard sauce, close kin to what the English call brandy butter, was a common accompaniment to steamed puddings on an American table.