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Steamed Cranberry Pudding
Make a simple Batter Pudding (see Introductory Recipes) adding a cup or more of chopped, uncooked cranberries, and flour to make rather stiff. Steam for two hours and serve with cranberry sauce.
CRANBERRY CAKE (Frozen) Make as for Sauce, straining. Add three cups of this to a syrup made of a pint each of sugar and water. Freeze partially, then mix in one pint of cream (whipped or plain) and complete the freezing. Frozen custard or ice may also be made with the cranberry.
Two recipes run together here: a steamed batter pudding and a frozen cranberry cream. Both depend on a base recipe printed elsewhere in the book, so the amounts below are the ones the original leaves you to guess at.
- The missing batter puddingThe book's introductory batter pudding is not reproduced here, so any amounts are a reconstruction: something on the order of 2 cups flour, a little salt, 2 eggs and about 1 cup milk beaten smooth, with or without a leavening. "Flour to make rather stiff" means adding enough extra flour that the batter mounds on the spoon rather than pouring, or the cranberries will sink and the pudding will be soggy at the base.
- Volume measures for sugarA pint means volume, not weight: a pint of sugar is 2 cups (about 14 oz), and a pint of water is 2 cups. The syrup is therefore equal parts by volume, which is a heavy syrup by modern standards.
- Steaming setupFill a greased 1 1/2-quart pudding mold or basin no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with a lid or pleated foil tied down, and set on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water; two hours is accurate for a mold that size.
- Chop the berries, do not halve themWhole raw cranberries burst and leave wet cavities. Chopping is what the recipe asks for, and a few pulses in a food processor gives the right coarse texture. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them suspended.
- Cranberry sauce as the sauceThe recipe says only "serve with cranberry sauce," so plain cooked cranberry sauce rather than a hard sauce. If you want it sweeter, thin the sauce with a little water and sugar so it pours.
- Freezing without a hand freezer"Freeze partially, then mix in one pint of cream" assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and salt. In an ice cream machine, churn the cranberry syrup until slushy, add the cream, and continue churning. Still-frozen in a shallow pan, beat it thoroughly at the slushy stage or it will set as a solid block.
- Straining"Make as for Sauce, straining" means cook the berries with water until they burst, then press through a sieve to remove skins. Three cups of strained purée needs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of fresh cranberries.
- YieldThe pudding serves six to eight. The frozen cranberry cake makes about 2 quarts, and it is very tart; taste the syrup before freezing, since cold mutes sweetness considerably.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits that kept without processing all winter, stored in barrels of cold water or spread in a cool cellar, which is why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks give them a whole cluster of recipes rather than the single sauce we now associate with them. A steamed batter pudding is the plainest of the English boiled-pudding family, cheap in eggs and butter and cooked over the same fire as the rest of dinner; dropping a native fruit into an inherited English form is exactly what American domestic cookery did repeatedly. The second recipe, a frozen "cake," reflects the moment when ice was cheap and household crank freezers were common enough that fruit ices and part-cream frozen desserts appeared in ordinary books alongside puddings.