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Poor Man's Pudding
1 cup Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon ginger ½ teaspoon allspice ½ teaspoon salt ¼ cup molasses ½ cup sweet milk ½ cup raisins.
Sift all dry ingredients together excepting the raisins. Add molasses, sweet milk and, lastly, the raisins. Steam 3 hours and serve warm with cream.
A plain steamed pudding with no eggs, butter or sugar beyond the molasses — the economy is the point. A few notes on vessels, timing and the vanished vocabulary.
- Sweet milkThis means fresh, unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that older recipes call for by name. Ordinary whole milk is exactly right.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour of the period, milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Modern all-purpose flour substitutes directly.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is the only leavening, and it works by reacting with the acid in the molasses. Use unsulphured cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher in flavour, and get the pudding into the steamer promptly once mixed.
- The mouldA greased 1-quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl, filled no more than two-thirds, covered tightly with pleated foil or a floured cloth tied under the rim. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise; a sealed lid without one will buckle.
- Steaming setupStand the mould on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer with the lid on. Check the water level every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water only.
- Three hours is generousFor a batter made from a single cup of flour, three hours is more than the pudding needs; in a modern pot it is likely done well short of that. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and note that a little extra steaming does no harm while undercooking leaves a wet centre.
- RaisinsToss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before adding, or they may sink. Dark raisins suit the pudding.
- Yield and servingA small pudding: three or four servings. "Cream" here means plain pouring cream, unwhipped and unsweetened; hard sauce or a thin custard also suits it.
Steamed puddings of this kind — flour, spice, molasses, a handful of dried fruit, and nothing costlier — carried the name "poor man's" across many nineteenth and early twentieth century North American cookbooks, where the name is usually taken to signal the absence of costly ingredients such as eggs, butter and sugar rather than any particular region or origin, though the recipes themselves vary and some do call for eggs or butter. Molasses did the work of sugar because it was cheaper, and the soda it activated made a chemical leavening that needed no yeast and no waiting. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households buying its flour, is full of such recipes: a promotional book had every reason to show that its flour could stretch a thin week as readily as a festive one. Steaming rather than baking also kept the dish practical on a wood range, where a pot of simmering water was far easier to hold steady for hours than an oven.