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Blueberry Pudding
3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup milk 1 egg 1 pint blueberries In making follow directions for cup cake. Stir in floured berries last and either bake or steam in a chimney mould. Serve with creamy sauce.
A plain creamed butter cake with berries folded in, baked or steamed. The book assumes you have read its cup cake method a few pages earlier, so the whole procedure is compressed into one line.
- "Follow directions for cup cake"That means the standard creaming method: beat the butter and sugar until light, beat in the egg, then add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk. Cup cake in this period is a proportional butter cake, not a cupcake in the modern paper-liner sense.
- Flouring the berriesToss the blueberries in a spoonful of the measured flour and fold them in at the very end with as few strokes as possible. The coating helps keep them suspended, and overmixing at this stage both toughens the crumb and bleeds purple through the batter.
- Chimney mouldA tube or ring mould with a hollow centre post — a Turk's head or angel-food style pan will do. The centre column carries heat into the middle of a dense berry batter, which matters more when steaming than when baking.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 350F; a tube mould of this size takes roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean of batter.
- If you steam itButter the mould, cover it tightly with foil or a cloth tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Allow about 1 1/2 hours, topping up with boiling water. Steamed, it comes out pale and moist rather than browned — a true pudding.
- A pint of blueberriesTwo cups by volume, roughly 10 to 12 ounces. Fresh is intended; frozen berries should go in unthawed and still floured, or they will streak the batter.
- Creamy sauceThe period standard is a sweet pudding sauce — creamed butter and powdered sugar beaten with cream and vanilla, or a thin custard. It is not whipped cream, though whipped cream is a fair substitute.
- YieldEight servings from a standard tube mould. Best warm; steamed puddings reheat well in the mould over simmering water.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and like most miller's cookbooks it exists to sell flour — hence the heavy representation of cakes, breads and puddings, and the habit of cross-referencing one recipe's method to another. This pudding sits between two traditions: the older English steamed pudding, boiled or steamed in a cloth or a mould for hours, and the newer American baking-powder cake, which the chemical leaveners of the nineteenth century made quick and reliable. That the recipe offers both options in a single clause — "either bake or steam" — suggests both were still current. Blueberries were an obvious choice for a Minnesota miller's audience; the wild lowbush berry was gathered across the northern states and Canada well before commercial highbush cultivation, which is generally traced to breeding work begun in the early 1900s.