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Ginger Pudding
1 egg. 1 cup sugar ⅔ cup sour milk 1 cup raisins 1 teaspoon ginger 2 tablespoons molasses Butter size of a walnut 1 teaspoon soda 3 cups Five Roses flour.
Steam 1 hour.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort that turned pantry staples into dessert with no eggs and no oven. The list is terse even by 1913 standards, so a few gaps need filling before you start.
- Butter size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons (15-30 g); period sources vary on this measure. Cream it with the sugar and molasses before the liquid goes in.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic and thick. Substitute buttermilk, or ⅔ cup milk with 2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left five minutes.
- Soda"Soda" here is baking soda, the leavening for the whole pudding; it depends on acid, chiefly from the sour milk, with the molasses contributing some as well, so sweet milk alone would leaven poorly. Mix it into the flour rather than dumping it into the liquid, and get the pudding into the steamer promptly.
- The flour is the ambiguityThree cups of flour to ⅔ cup liquid gives something closer to dough than batter. Either the recipe assumes a very stiff, scone-like pudding mixture, or a quantity of milk or water has dropped out of the printing. Add milk cautiously until you have a thick, dropping batter rather than trusting the ratio as written.
- Vessel and steamingGrease a pudding basin or mould of at least 1½ quarts (the mixture makes considerably more than a quart), fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with pleated parchment and foil or a floured cloth tied down. Stand it on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it drops.
- TimingThe book says one hour, which suits a shallow mould or individual cups; a deep basin may well need longer. Test with a skewer to the centre, which should come out clean and hot.
- RaisinsToss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before adding, or they settle to the bottom during the long steam.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. Steamed puddings of this kind were commonly sent to table hot with a sauce -- a caramel or lemon sauce, or plain cream.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given away with or sold cheaply alongside its Five Roses flour, a hugely successful piece of Canadian brand advertising in the years around 1913. Recipes were largely contributed by the flour's own customers, which explains the telegraphic style here: a home cook wrote down what she already knew by hand, and the compilers printed it as received. A whole chapter of boiled and steamed puddings made sense in a household with a wood or coal range, where keeping a pot simmering on the top was far easier and cheaper than holding an oven at temperature. Sour milk, molasses and ginger were the standing trio of the thrifty pudding: soured milk was an unavoidable by-product of unpasteurized dairy, molasses was cheaper than sugar, and ground ginger kept indefinitely on the shelf.