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Cup Pudding
2 eggs. ½ cup butter ¾ cup sugar ¾ cup Five Roses flour ¾ cup milk 1½ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon extract of lemon Fruit (fresh or preserved).
Fill cups ½ full of this batter after you have put in a small quantity of preserves.
Steam ½ hour. Serve with either cream or sauce.
A small-batch steamed pudding baked in individual cups rather than one large mould, which is why the steaming time is only half an hour. The batter is stiff and the fruit sits at the bottom, so it turns out as a little upside-down pudding.
- The cupsThese are ordinary teacups or custard cups, roughly 6 oz, not modern oversized mugs. Butter them well and dust with sugar or flour, or the batter will grip when you unmould.
- Fill only half fullThe instruction is easy to skim past and it matters most. Baking powder plus trapped steam makes this batter climb; filled higher, it will dome over the rim and spread into the water.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Plain all-purpose is the right substitute; the recipe already supplies its own leavening, so do not use self-rising.
- No eggsThe list is correct as printed. It is leavened only by baking powder, which gives a soft, cakey crumb rather than the dense suet texture of a traditional boiled pudding. The recipe gives no mixing method; creaming the butter and sugar well will help, since that aeration contributes much of the lift.
- Extract of lemonA full teaspoon of old-style lemon extract in this quantity of batter is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon, reads better now.
- Steaming setupStand the cups on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to reach halfway up the cups, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water if it drops. Cover each cup with a small square of buttered foil or parchment so condensation does not sit on the surface.
- DonenessHalf an hour is what the recipe gives for small cups; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Larger cups will need longer.
- Yield and servingEnough for about six small cups. Loosen the edges, invert onto plates while hot so the preserves run down, and serve with pouring cream or a hot lemon or vanilla sauce.
Steamed puddings in cups were the practical end of a long British tradition: the same batters that went into a cloth-tied basin for Sunday dinner, scaled down so they cooked far more quickly on a stovetop. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which is why the flour is named and the rest is left to the cook's judgment; the book assumed a reader who already knew how to rig a steamer and had a shelf of home preserves to spend. The fruit at the bottom of the cup could be fresh or preserved, as the cook's stores allowed.