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Huckleberry, Blackberry, or Cherry Pudding
Into 1 egg lightly beaten pour 1 cupful molasses, add 1 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in a little water, then thicken with 2 1/2 cupfuls flour, add 1 pint huckleberries, dusted with flour, bake about one hour, and serve with foaming sauce.
This recipe will also do for blackberry, raspberry, or cherry pudding.
A stiff, dark molasses batter studded with fruit, baked rather than steamed. The batter is drier than most modern cooks expect, and that is deliberate.
- The batter is meant to be thickApart from the molasses, the egg and the little water the soda is dissolved in, there is no liquid, so 2 1/2 cupfuls of flour gives a stiff dough you spread rather than pour. If it will not spread at all, a few tablespoons of milk or water brings it together without slackening it into cake batter.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given: bake at 350F for the stated hour in a buttered 8-inch square dish or a 2-quart pudding basin. A skewer in the centre should come out clean; molasses batters look darker and wetter than they are.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoonful of soda is neutralised by the acid in the molasses, which is what makes the pudding rise. Use unsulphured cane molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than the lighter molasses generally called for in books of this period.
- Dusting the fruitTossing the berries in flour before folding them in keeps them suspended instead of settling to the bottom. Do it at the last moment, and fold rather than beat, or the juice will streak the batter.
- A pint of fruitA pint measure of berries is about 12 oz, or roughly 2 cups. Wild huckleberries are hard to buy; cultivated blueberries behave the same way, though they are sweeter and juicier.
- If you use cherriesPit them and halve them, and drain them well. Sour cherries suit the molasses better than sweet ones, and whole cherries release enough liquid to leave a soggy seam through the middle.
- Foaming sauceThe period sauce is butter and sugar creamed together, then beaten over hot water with a little wine, brandy or boiling water until it froths. It must be served the moment it foams; it separates if held.
- YieldServes six to eight, warm, with the sauce poured over at the table.
Baked puddings of this kind sit somewhere between the English boiled pudding and the American cake. Molasses with soda was a cheap leavening in nineteenth-century households: molasses cost considerably less than refined sugar, and soda took over work that eggs and long beating had done earlier. Huckleberries were gathered wild in the northeastern United States and sold by the pint in summer markets. Interchangeable-fruit formulas of this sort turn up often in books assembled from contributed recipes, where one batter could be used with whatever fruit was in season.