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Chocolate Pudding
1 cup Five Roses flour Pinch of salt 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 egg (beaten light) 2 tablespoons sugar Butter, size of a walnut (melted) ½ cup milk 1 squares melted chocolate.
Stir all together. Add flour. Butter tin and steam 1 hour. Serve with sauce or whipped cream.
A small steamed chocolate pudding of the kind that filled a corner of the stove while dinner cooked. The written order of operations is muddled, and the chocolate needs translating.
- Mix in the right order"Stir all together. Add flour" contradicts the ingredient list. Beat the egg with the sugar, melted butter, milk and melted chocolate, then fold in the flour, salt and baking powder in one go. Stop as soon as the flour disappears — a beaten batter gives a tough, rubbery pudding.
- One square of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, still sold in that form. With only 2 tablespoons of sugar the result is markedly bitter by modern taste; if you substitute semi-sweet, cut nothing else but expect a sweeter, softer pudding.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons; period sources vary. Nut- and egg-sized comparisons were common nineteenth-century shorthand, with "the size of an egg" usually reckoned at about 2 ounces.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, slightly higher in protein than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; for a more tender crumb, replace 2 tablespoons of the cup with cornstarch.
- The tin and the steamButter a 3- to 4-cup mould or pudding basin, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with buttered foil or a pleated cloth tied down. Set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates — the pot must never run dry.
- TimingOne hour is right for a single mould of this size; a skewer should come out with moist crumbs, not batter. If you divide the batter among individual cups, check at 30 to 35 minutes.
- Yield and sauceServes four modestly. A period sauce might be a thin vanilla custard or a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar; whipped cream, as the book allows, does the same job of cutting the bitterness.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century — a flour advertisement in the form of a genuinely useful kitchen manual, with recipes gathered from the company's own customers. Its long chapter of boiled and steamed puddings is often said to reflect a period when many homes cooked on a wood or coal range where oven heat was uneven and expensive to hold steady, while a pot of simmering water on the top was already there. Steaming produced a moist, close-grained pudding almost impossible to burn.