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Strawberry Batter Cups
Stir one pint of sugar through a quart of slightly mashed berries. Make a batter with one and a half cups of flour in which has been sifted a half-teaspoon of salt and one heaping teaspoon of baking-powder. Mix with this a tablespoon of butter, two beaten eggs, and one cup of milk. Place a layer of the batter in buttered cups or moulds, then a layer of the berries, etc., until two-thirds full. Steam or bake for forty minutes. Serve with whipped cream or strawberry sauce
A straightforward steamed or baked cup pudding from strawberry season, written when a cook was expected to know what "buttered cups" meant and how long to steam them. The measurements are volume-based throughout, including the sugar.
- A pint of sugarMeasured by volume, not weight: 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. Against a quart of berries this is very sweet by current taste, and half the amount still draws plenty of juice.
- A quart of berriesAbout 1.5 lb of hulled strawberries. "Slightly mashed" means crushed just enough to break the surface, not pureed.
- Drain before layeringThe sugar will pull out a good deal of syrup within twenty minutes. Lift the berries out with a slotted spoon when you layer them or the batter turns sodden at the joins; the drained syrup, reduced a little, will serve as a strawberry sauce.
- Heaping teaspoonRead as about 1.5 level teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder.
- The cupsIndividual china custard cups, timbale moulds or teacups. Six-ounce ramekins or a standard muffin tin work; butter them well and fill only two-thirds, as the batter climbs.
- SteamingCover each cup with buttered foil or paper, set on a rack in a pot with an inch of simmering water, lid on, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full 40 minutes. Topping up with boiling water partway is normal.
- BakingThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable modern choice. Ramekins in a shallow pan of hot water give a texture closer to the steamed version; baked dry they will be nearer a berry muffin and may be done before the stated forty minutes, so test with a skewer.
- YieldDepends on the size of the moulds; the quantities as written will fill more than eight 6 oz cups if all the berries are used. Turn them out while warm; they stick badly once cool.
Individual steamed cup puddings were a standard summer dessert in American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and the technique long predates reliable home ovens: a covered mould in a pot of simmering water needed only a stove top and gave a moist, even result. What marks this version as later is the baking powder and the option to bake, both signs of a kitchen with chemical leaveners on the shelf and a range whose oven could be trusted. In the decades around 1900, rail shipping and commercial berry growing put strawberries in city markets well beyond the few weeks of a local crop.