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Madeira Pudding
Weight of 2 eggs in Five Roses flour Weight of 2 eggs in butter ½ teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons jam (any kind).
Cream butter and flour together, and work in the eggs. Then add baking powder and salt. Mix in the jam. Butter a mould and fill three parts with the mixture.
Steam 1 hour. Serve with sweet sauce.
A steamed pudding built on the old "weigh it against the eggs" principle, which is more reliable than it looks once you put it on a scale.
- Weight of 2 eggsWeigh the two whole eggs in their shells, then match that weight in flour and again in butter. Large eggs run about 55-60 g each, so expect roughly 110-120 g (about 1 scant cup flour, and about 1/2 cup butter).
- The eggs go in wholeThe eggs are both the measure and an ingredient. Cream the butter, work in the flour, then beat in the two eggs one at a time; the batter should be a thick dropping consistency.
- No sugarThe only sweetness comes from the two tablespoons of jam and whatever sauce you serve. This is deliberate, and the pudding will taste plain if you skip the sauce.
- Three parts fullFill the mould only three-quarters, or about 3 parts in 4. The batter climbs as it steams and a full mould will push the lid off. A 1-pint pudding basin suits this quantity.
- Cover the mouldThe original assumes a lidded pudding mould. Butter the basin, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim, and set it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan with water halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water.
- One hour, and test itAn hour is right for a pint basin. A skewer through the centre should come out clean; if the top is still wet, re-cover and give it another ten minutes rather than turning up the heat.
- Sweet sauceThe term covered a range in this period: a thin custard, a cornflour-thickened sugar sauce, or a hard sauce of creamed butter and icing sugar. Warmed jam thinned with a spoonful of water also works and echoes the pudding.
- YieldServes 3 to 4 as written. You can weigh against three or four eggs to make more, increasing the baking powder and jam in proportion.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to sell its flour, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives. The name here appears to borrow from Madeira cake, the plain buttery English cake generally said to be named not for any ingredient but for the glass of Madeira wine served alongside it in the nineteenth century; the pudding version uses a similar equal-weight butter-and-flour logic and adapts it to the steamer. Weighing dry goods against eggs in the shell was a familiar household method, and it had the advantage of self-correcting: bigger eggs simply produced a bigger pudding in the same proportions.