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Snowball Pudding
⅓ cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk 2¼ cups Five Roses flour 3½ teaspoons baking powder 4 eggs (whites).
Cream butter and add sugar. Cream again until sugar is dissolved, using a small quantity of hot water. Stir in milk.
Sift in the flour and baking powder. Then fold in the stiffly beaten whites of 4 eggs.
Steam 35 minutes in buttered cups. Serve hot with canned fruit, lemon or chocolate sauce.
A plain white steamed pudding baked in individual moulds — essentially a cake batter set by steam rather than dry heat. The batter is stiff, so the handling of the egg whites decides the texture.
- Fold, do not stirThe four whites are the only lightness this pudding has beyond the baking powder. Beat them to soft-firm peaks and cut them in with a spatula in three additions; overworking them gives a dense, rubbery pudding.
- The "small quantity of hot water"A tablespoon or two, added while creaming, to soften the butter and help the sugar dissolve. It is not part of the liquid measure — add it sparingly or the batter loosens too far.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose hard-wheat flour of the period. Modern all-purpose works directly; if your flour is a soft Southern brand, expect a slightly more tender crumb.
- Baking powder quantityThree and a half teaspoons to 2¼ cups of flour is heavy by current standards. Period powders were single-acting and gave up much of their gas during mixing, which may account for the generous measure. Two and a half teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should give a cleaner flavour without the metallic edge.
- "Buttered cups"Teacups, custard cups or dariole moulds, filled about two-thirds. Butter them well and, if you like, dust with sugar. Individual ramekins or a muffin tin set on a rack in a covered pot works the same way.
- Setting up the steamerA rack in a wide pot with an inch or two of simmering water, lid on, water kept at a bare simmer and topped up as needed. Cover the cups loosely with foil or buttered paper so condensation does not pit the tops.
- DonenessThirty-five minutes suits cups of about ½ cup capacity; larger moulds want 45–50 minutes. The pudding should spring back and a skewer come out clean.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends entirely on the size of the cups; this is a full cake batter, so count on rather more small moulds than you expect. Turn them out hot and serve immediately with lemon or chocolate sauce, or with a syrupy canned fruit as the book suggests — they stiffen quickly as they cool.
- Using up the yolksFour yolks are left over. They keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator and go straight into a custard sauce for the puddings themselves.
Steamed puddings were the workhorse dessert of a coal- or wood-fired kitchen: the oven might be occupied or unreliable, but a pot of water on the stovetop was always available, and steam produces a moist crumb without any risk of scorching. The name is often said to describe the look — small, round, snowy-white puddings, made pale by using only the whites of the eggs, a common Victorian and Edwardian trick that also produced white cake and angel food. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, was one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada in the early twentieth century; its boiled and steamed puddings like this one reflect how routine the technique still was in a household kitchen of the 1910s.