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Steamed Chocolate Pudding
1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 1/2 oz. of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of milk, 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt.
Steam one hour, serve with a hot, creamy sauce.
A promotional booklet recipe written for cooks who already knew how a steamed pudding went together; the ingredient list is complete but the method is barely a sentence. A few things need filling in.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was the company's plain unsweetened cake chocolate, sold in blocks. Use 1 1/2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, not semisweet and not cocoa powder.
- The batter is very stiff as writtenA cup and a half of flour against half a cup of milk gives something closer to a dough than a batter. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the melted chocolate, then alternate the sifted dry ingredients with the milk, and expect to add milk a spoonful at a time until it drops heavily from the spoon. Some contemporary versions of this pudding include an egg; this one does not.
- Assembling for the steamerButter a 1-quart mold or pudding basin and fill it no more than two-thirds, since the baking powder will lift it considerably. Cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down so condensation cannot drip in.
- How to steamSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water level partway through and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- DonenessOne hour is right for a 1-quart mold. A skewer into the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides; smaller individual molds want 30-40 minutes.
- Hot creamy sauceIn this period this most likely means a thin stirred custard or a cornstarch-thickened vanilla sauce. (Hard sauce -- butter and sugar creamed with flavoring -- was a common accompaniment to steamed puddings generally, but it is not a hot sauce and is not what this recipe calls for.)
- YieldThe booklet gives none; the quantities suggest roughly four to six servings. It should reheat acceptably by re-steaming.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate milling on the Neponset River back to the 1765 partnership of Dr. James Baker and the Irish chocolate-maker John Hannon; Baker carried the business on alone after Hannon's disappearance in 1779. By the late nineteenth century it was among the best-known chocolate names in the United States. Booklets like Choice Recipes were advertising: collections credited in part to domestic-science teachers and cooking-school writers, distributed free or for a few cents, with the company's products named by their trade designations in the ingredient lists. "Premium No. 1" was the plain unsweetened chocolate, and specifying it by name in a recipe was the point of the exercise. The dish itself belongs to the English steamed-pudding tradition that American households kept up well into the twentieth century, when a mold set over simmering water was an easy way to produce a hot dessert without heating an oven.