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Red Raspberry Pudding
Make as for Blackberry Pudding (Steamed), using the whipped whites of eggs in addition to yolks and serving with crushed raspberries sweetened well and heated just before serving.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the steamed blackberry pudding in hand and changes two things — the eggs are separated and the whites whipped, and the sauce is warm crushed raspberries rather than a hard or liquid dessert sauce. Everything below is about making that translation work without the parent recipe in front of you.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whipped whites are one of the two changes the recipe makes to the blackberry version. Beat them to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold them into the finished batter in two additions with a spatula. Stirred in, they collapse and you have simply made the original pudding with extra eggs.
- What the parent recipe looks likeWhat the parent recipe might look like -- A steamed berry pudding of this period may be a creamed butter-and-sugar base with eggs, flour, a little baking powder, and milk, with the berries floured and folded in last; suet and plain batter versions were also common. If you build one along those lines, something close to 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 3/4 cup milk and a pint of berries will work. Because the original gives no quantities here, treat all of this as a guess rather than a conversion.
- Steaming, not bakingButter a 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or mold, fill it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil or a lid, and set it on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up the side. Keep the water at a steady low boil and top it up with more boiling water as it goes down.
- TimeAllow 1 1/2 to 2 hours for a mold that size, and test with a skewer at the center rather than by the clock. Let the pudding stand 10 minutes before turning it out or it will slump.
- Handling raspberriesRaspberries are far softer than blackberries and will break down into the batter, streaking it pink. Fold them in at the very last moment with a light hand, and use dry-picked fruit; washed berries hold water that thins the batter.
- The sauceCrush the raspberries with sugar to taste, let them sit until the sugar dissolves, then warm them only to steaming. Held over heat they turn to jam and lose the fresh flavor the recipe is after. Frozen raspberries, thawed, work well for this; sweeten to taste.
- YieldA pudding of the size described serves six to eight, cut in wedges. It is best the day it is made; leftovers reheat well in the steamer for 15 minutes.
Steamed puddings like this one belonged to the era of the coal or wood range, when a pot could sit at a simmer at the back of the stove for two hours with no attention and no risk of scorching — an advantage over baking in an oven whose temperature nobody could read. Fruit cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often organized exactly as this one is, by fruit rather than by course, which is why the recipe can afford to be two lines long: the compiler assumed you had just read the blackberry version a page or two earlier and would carry the method across. The separated eggs mark this as the more delicate member of the family, and may reflect the lighter sponge and soufflé puddings of the period, while the sauce of sweetened crushed raw fruit warmed at the last minute appears to be a common American treatment for soft summer berries, the same idea that turns up as the sauce for shortcake.