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Steamed Graham Pudding
1 cupful thick sour milk, 1/2 cupful Porto Rico molasses, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful soda in milk, 1 cupful seeded raisins, 1/2 cupful currants, 1 cupful fine bread crumbs, 2 cupfuls Graham flour; steam in buttered mould three hours; bake; garnish of maple hard sauce.
A plain steamed brown pudding of the sour-milk-and-soda school, leavened entirely by the reaction between the acid milk and the soda. The batter is stiff and dark, and it wants a full three hours of gentle, constant steam.
- The hinge: get the mould in the steam immediatelyThe soda begins working the moment it hits the sour milk, and there is no other leavening. Have the water at a rolling boil and the buttered mould ready before you mix, and fill it no more than two-thirds so the pudding has room to rise.
- Thick sour milkThis is naturally clabbered milk, not spoiled pasteurised milk, which simply rots. Use 1 cup of well-shaken buttermilk, or 1 cup of whole milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Porto Rico molassesA cane molasses of ordinary table grade, not blackstrap. Unsulphured dark molasses is the reasonable substitute; blackstrap is more bitter and less acid, so it works less well with the soda.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the nearest thing; regular whole wheat works but gives a finer, tighter crumb.
- Steaming setupSet the covered, buttered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and cover the pot. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops, or the pudding stalls.
- "Bake"The recipe gives no temperature or time. After three hours of steam the pudding is already cooked through, so the direction is probably a brief spell uncovered in a moderate oven to dry and firm the surface before unmoulding; treat it as optional.
- Maple hard sauceBeat 1/2 cup softened butter with about 1 cup sifted confectioners' sugar and 2 to 3 tablespoons maple syrup, or use maple sugar in place of some of the white. Chill until firm and serve cold against the hot pudding.
- YieldAbout a 1 1/2-quart mould, serving eight. Leftovers reheat well with another twenty minutes of steam.
Steamed puddings in this style are the American descendants of English boiled suet puddings, adapted to a stove and a lidded mould rather than a cloth in a cauldron. The use of graham flour points to the mid-nineteenth-century following of Sylvester Graham, whose advocacy of unbolted wheat kept coarse whole-meal flour on grocers' shelves long after his reform movement faded, and by 1900 graham flour was simply an ordinary pantry item. Sour milk with soda was the standard leavening of a household that soured its own milk daily, and the raisins, currants and molasses mark this as a winter pudding, made from keeping ingredients when fresh fruit was not to be had.