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Light Pudding
Butter size of an egg 1 cup sugar 2 eggs (small) or 1 large egg 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons (level) cream of tartar. 1 teaspoon soda 1 cup sweet milk 1 cup raisins (floured).
Steam 1 hour over hot stove. Serve with plain sauce. 2 eggs
A plain steamed raisin pudding of the sort that filled out a winter dinner. The proportions are sound; most of what needs translating is the measuring and the steaming setup.
- Butter size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 1/4 cup. The comparison was standard when butter came in a crock rather than a stamped quarter-pound brick.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is baking powder made in the bowl: at the usual 2:1 ratio, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar with 1 teaspoon soda works out to roughly 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. The homemade version is single-acting, so it starts working the moment the milk goes in — get the pudding into the steamer promptly.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes often called for alongside soda alone.
- Floured raisinsTossing the raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of the mold. Worth doing; the batter here is loose.
- Steaming setupButter a 1 1/2 to 2 quart mold or pudding basin and fill it no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, set on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a steady simmer and top up with boiling water as needed.
- The hour is optimistic"Steam 1 hour over hot stove" assumes a range at a hard boil and a wide, shallow mold. In a deeper basin this batter usually wants 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours. Test with a skewer at the center; it should come out clean and the pudding should spring back.
- Plain sauceThe book means a simple sweet pudding sauce — sugar, butter, a little flour or cornstarch, boiling water and vanilla or nutmeg, cooked until it thickens. Hard sauce or warm custard also suits it.
- The stray lineThe "2 eggs" repeated at the end appears to be a duplication in the original page or its transcription rather than a second addition. Use two small eggs or one large, as the ingredient list says.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well by steaming the leftover slices for a few minutes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why so many entries, this one included, read like a note passed between neighbours rather than a tested formula. Steamed and boiled puddings occupy a large section because they suited the kitchens of the period: a pudding could go on the back of the range and look after itself while the rest of the meal was made, and it needed no oven space at all, which mattered a great deal in a wood- or coal-fired kitchen. The cream of tartar and soda pairing is the older way of leavening, predating the ready-mixed baking powders that were displacing it by the 1910s. "Light" here probably distinguishes the pudding from the dense, long-boiled, suet-and-fruit puddings of the Christmas tradition — an hour in the steamer rather than four or five.