Home › Village Receipts › Twenty-Five Cent Plum Pudding
Twenty-Five Cent Plum Pudding
One pint of graham or whole wheat flour, one-half cup of milk, one cup of molasses, one-half pound of seeded and chopped raisins, one-third pound of almonds blanched and cut, one-half teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of soda, one teaspoon of baking powder. Dissolve the soda in a tablespoon of warm water, add to the molasses, then add milk, flour and other ingredients, steam .in a closely covered mould four hours.
Sauce-One cup of water, one teaspoon of corustarch, onebalf cup of sugar salt and flavor.
— Mrs. H. B. Morrison
A frugal steamed pudding with no eggs, no butter and no suet — the molasses and the long steam do all the work. It behaves more like a dense steamed brown bread than a Christmas plum pudding, and it wants a sauce.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here: one pint is two cups, roughly 9 oz of whole wheat flour. Spoon it into the cup rather than scooping, or the batter will be too stiff to steam evenly.
- The batter is thin on purposeThe batter is soft, not stiff -- Half a cup of milk to a cup of molasses and two cups of flour, plus the fruit and nuts, gives a heavy batter just soft enough to spoon into the mould. Resist adding flour; the steam sets it, and extra flour makes it dry and crumbly.
- Soda and molassesDissolving the soda in warm water before it meets the molasses is the hinge of the method. Molasses is acidic, and the reaction begins immediately, so get the pudding into the mould and the mould into the steam without delay.
- The mouldUse a 2-quart pudding basin or a well-greased tin with a tight lid, filled no more than two-thirds; the mixture comes to something over a quart and a half. If the lid is not clamped, cover with buttered parchment and foil tied down with string, or condensation will drip in and waterlog the top.
- Steaming, and the four hoursSet the mould on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water. Four hours is not excessive for a batter this dense, though a smaller mould will be done in about two and a half; test with a skewer to the centre.
- The sauce is unfinished as writtenOne cup water, a teaspoon cornstarch, half a cup sugar, salt and flavouring — no cooking instruction is given. Slake the cornstarch in a little cold water, bring the rest to a boil with the sugar, stir the slurry in and simmer a minute until clear. A teaspoon of cornstarch to a cup of water gives only a light glaze; use two for anything thicker. "Flavor" most likely meant vanilla, lemon or nutmeg.
- AlmondsA third of a pound of blanched almonds is about a cup whole, a little more once cut. Buy them blanched and slice or coarsely chop; skin-on almonds will speckle the crumb.
- Yield and keepingServes eight generously. It reheats well — 20 minutes back in the steamer — and keeps wrapped and refrigerated for several days, improving slightly on the second day.
The title is the whole argument: a pudding that could be put on the table for a quarter at a time when a proper plum pudding meant suet, brandy, candied peel, eggs and a pound of currants. What survives here is the shape of the thing — steamed in a covered mould, dark with molasses, studded with raisins — while the expensive parts have been left out and cheap graham flour used instead of white. Community cookbooks of this kind, gathered from the households of a single town, are full of such economies, and this one carries a contributor's name. Graham flour took its name from the dietary reformer Sylvester Graham.