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Whole Wheat Pudding
¼ cup butter ½ cup molasses ½ cup milk 1 egg 1½ cups whole wheat flour ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup raisins (stoned and chopped).
Melt butter, add molasses, milk and well-beaten egg. Add dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Add raisins. Steam in buttered mould 2½ hours. Serve with any pudding sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the kind that turned up on Canadian tables all winter. The method is simple; the only thing that will ruin it is letting the water go off the boil or run dry.
- Steaming, in practiceFill a buttered pudding mould or basin no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with buttered foil or a lid, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops — cold water added mid-way stalls the cooking.
- Stoned raisins"Stoned" means seeded. Seeded raisins were still common when this was written; modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop, or none at all.
- The saltA full teaspoon with 1½ cups of flour reads high to a modern palate, particularly alongside molasses. Half a teaspoon gives a better balance, and less again if you are using salted butter.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is the only leavening and it works by reacting with the acid in the molasses. Use real molasses or dark treacle, not blackstrap alone (too bitter) and not a molasses-flavoured syrup, or the pudding will be dense and taste faintly soapy.
- Whole wheat flourPeriod whole wheat was coarser and thirstier than today's finely milled version. If the batter looks stiff rather than thickly droppable, add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- DonenessTwo hours is right for a single mould of this size. Test with a skewer to the centre; it should come out clean. Let the pudding stand five to ten minutes before unmoulding so it firms up and releases cleanly.
- Pudding sauce"Any pudding sauce" in books of this period usually means a hard sauce (creamed butter and sugar), a vanilla or lemon cornstarch sauce, or a foamy egg sauce. Warm sauces suit this pudding better than cold.
- Yield and keepingServes six modestly. Steamed puddings reheat well — return the covered mould to the steamer for 20 to 30 minutes, or microwave individual slices briefly with a spoonful of sauce.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour. Boiled and steamed puddings had their own chapter in many North American household books of the period because they needed no oven — a real advantage on a wood range where oven heat was expensive and unreliable, while a pot could simmer on a back burner for hours with little attention. The molasses-and-raisin combination is often taken to place this in the long line of thrifty descendants of English plum pudding, cheap enough for a weeknight and sturdy enough to reheat for several days.