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Other Sweet Dishes: Steam
STEAMED ORANGE PUDDING 3/4 cup of scalded milk Grated rind and juice of halt 1/2 cup of grated bread crumbs an orange 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of lemon juice 2 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped 1/4 cup of sugar almonds Pour the milk over the crumbs and butter and let stand an hour. Beat the eggs; add the sugar and beat again; add fruit juice and almonds and mix all together. Steam one hour. Serve with hard sauce.
STEAMED PRUNE PUDDING 1/3 cup of stale bread crumbs 1/3 cup of sugar 1/3 cup of flour 1 egg. beaten light 1 level teaspoonful of baking 1/3 cup of prune puree powder 1/4 teaspoonful of salt 1/3 cup of fine-chopped suet 1/3 cup of milk Mix together the crumbs, flour and baking powder, suet and sugar. To the beaten egg add the puree, salt and milk. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients. Steam two hours in a buttered, tightclosed mold. An empty baking powder box makes a good mold. Leave plenty of room for the pudding to swell. Serve with hard or liquid sauce.
STEAMED CHOCOLATE PUDDING, SULTANA SAUCE Pudding 1/2 teaspoonful of cinnamor 1 cup of sifted pastry flour 1/4 teaspoonful of salt 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls of baking 1 egg powder 1/3 cup of sugar 3 tablespoonfuls of melted Sauce butter 1/4 cup of sultana raisins 1/4 cup of milk 1 cup of boiling water 2 ounces of chocolate 1/2 cup of sugar Flavor to taste Sift together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Beat the yolk of egg light, the white till dry; beat the sugar into the yolk of egg; add the butter and milk and stir into the first mixture; add the chocolate melted over hot water and, lastly, the white of egg. Steam in two or three cups about twenty-five minutes. Cook the raisins tender in the water; add the sugar, let boil five minutes, then flavor and use.
Three steamed puddings from a two-person household book, printed in double columns that the scanner has interleaved — read the ingredient lists knowing that stray fragments belong to the facing column. All three are small-batch, and the measurements are consistent enough to reconstruct.
- Reading the garbled listsIn the orange pudding the ingredients are: 3/4 cup scalded milk, 1/2 cup grated bread crumbs, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, grated rind and juice of half an orange, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 2 tablespoons chopped almonds. In the chocolate pudding: 1 cup sifted pastry flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1/3 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1/4 cup milk, 2 ounces chocolate; the sauce is 1/4 cup sultanas, 1 cup boiling water, 1/2 cup sugar, flavoring.
- The hinge: steam, not boilThe mold sits on a rack above an inch or two of gently simmering water, covered, with the lid of the mold tied or clamped down so condensation cannot drip in. Water at a hard boil will jostle the molds and can force water past the cover; keep it barely trembling and top it up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- Molds"An empty baking powder box" was typically a straight-sided tin with a friction lid — the modern stand-ins are individual pudding basins, 6-ounce ramekins covered with buttered foil, or straight-sided canning jars with the rings only lightly finger-tight. Leave plenty of room for the pudding to swell, as the book says, because the batters climb.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge, around 180F. With pasteurized milk this is no longer needed to kill anything; it simply softens the crumbs faster and melts the butter, so warm milk poured over crumbs and butter and left an hour does the same work.
- SuetThe prune pudding's 1/3 cup of fine-chopped suet is raw beef kidney fat, which a butcher can usually supply, or buy shredded suet in a packet. Grated frozen unsalted butter or vegetable shortening substitutes acceptably, though the crumb will be slightly less open.
- ChocolateTwo ounces of "chocolate" in a book of this period means unsweetened baking chocolate, not a modern eating bar. Using semisweet will likely make the pudding cloying next to a sugar-and-raisin sauce.
- Pastry flour and "flavor to taste"Pastry flour is soft and low in protein; a cake-flour and all-purpose blend is the closest stand-in. The sauce flavoring would most likely have been vanilla, lemon, or a spoonful of brandy or sherry — a teaspoon is enough for a cup of syrup.
- Doneness and timingThe chocolate cups need about 25 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the tops spring back. The prune pudding's two hours is right for a dense suet batter. The orange pudding is essentially a crumb custard with no flour, so treat it as custard: it is done when set at the edges and only faintly wobbly at the center, near 175F, which may come before the full hour in small molds.
- Hard sauce and yieldHard sauce is butter creamed with about twice its volume of powdered sugar and a flavoring, chilled firm and spooned onto the hot pudding. Each of these makes two to three servings, which is the whole premise of the book.
Steamed puddings survived into the early twentieth century for what was likely a practical reason: they wanted a covered pot on the range rather than a hot oven, which would have suited small households and warm weather. This is the logic of a book pitched at two people: a full boiled plum pudding in a cloth is a Christmas undertaking, but a batter steamed twenty-five minutes in two teacups is an ordinary Tuesday. The suet in the prune pudding is the older English tradition, and dried-fruit purees like prune stood in for expensive fresh fruit out of season; sultanas, the pale seedless raisins whose name is generally traced to an Ottoman origin and which were reportedly imported chiefly from Smyrna in this period, are used here to build a sauce out of nothing more than water and sugar. The instruction to use an empty baking powder box is a small period portrait in itself: tins seem to have been reused as a matter of course, and baking powder was sold in exactly the tall friction-lidded shape a single pudding wants.