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Carrot Pudding (No. 1)
1 cup grated raw carrots 1 cup grated raw potatoes 1 cup sifted Five Roses flour 1 cup white sugar ½ cup seeded raisins ½ cup currants ½ cup butter ½ teaspoon cloves ½ teaspoon nutmeg ½ teaspoon cinnamon FIVE ROSES 1 teaspoon soda in ½ cup grated potato saved till last, and added last of all.
Flour the fruit well and steam 3 hours.
Serve with maple syrup sauce. See Pudding Sauces, page 65.
A steamed pudding of the plum-pudding family, leavened with soda and bound by nothing but grated vegetables and butter. Two details in the original need sorting out before you start.
- The potato is measured twiceThe list calls for 1 cup grated raw potato, then the closing line asks for soda stirred into ½ cup grated potato "saved till last." The ½ cup may be reserved from the cup already measured, or additional; the wording is genuinely ambiguous, so grate about 1½ cups if you want to be certain of the full body.
- Why the potato goes in lastGrated raw potato oxidises and weeps quickly, and soda starts to release gas once it is wetted. Mixing the soda into the reserved potato and folding it in at the very end presumably explains the instruction, so get it into the mould and over the steam without delay.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour of the period. Plain all-purpose flour is the closest modern stand-in; the cup should be measured after sifting, as the recipe specifies, which runs a little lighter than a scooped cup.
- No eggs, no liquidThere is no egg and no milk here. The batter will look impossibly stiff, closer to a dough than a pudding mixture. That is correct, the carrot and potato release plenty of water during the long steam.
- Butter and sugarCream the ½ cup butter with the sugar before adding the vegetables, fruit and spice, unless you prefer the older method of rubbing the butter through the flour. Either works, but creamed butter gives a finer crumb.
- Setting up the steamGrease a 1½ to 2 quart pudding mould or basin, fill it no more than two-thirds, cover with greased parchment and foil tied down, and stand it on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Keep it at a steady simmer and top up with boiling water; three hours of dry pot ruins both pudding and pan.
- Flouring the fruitTossing the raisins and currants in a little of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking into the base during the long, slow set.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out, and serve hot with the maple syrup sauce the recipe directs you to on page 65.
- Keeping and reheatingIt will keep several days wrapped in the refrigerator. Re-steam 30 to 45 minutes to serve again.
Carrot puddings belong to a long British line of sweet boiled puddings in which grated root vegetables stand in for some of the flour, fat and dried fruit that a proper plum pudding would demand. Carrot and potato both bring sugar and moisture, and both were cheap and available all winter in a Canadian cellar, which is why versions of this pudding recur through nineteenth and early twentieth century North American cookbooks and again in both wartimes when sugar, eggs and butter were restricted. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and was compiled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, which accounts for the terse, assumed-knowledge style of the method. The maple syrup sauce is a Canadian touch: elsewhere the same pudding might have been sent to table with hard sauce or a lemon sauce.