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Steam Batter Pudding
1 cup milk 8 tablespoons melted butter 1/2 cup sugar Steam for one hours 4 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder Gold Medal flour for cake batter
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in flour-company booklets, where the cook was assumed to know what a steamed pudding looked like. Two things are left unstated: how much flour, and how to rig the steamer.
- The flour is not specified"Flour for cake batter" means enough to bring the liquid to a thick, spoon-dropping batter — in practice somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 cups, but the original genuinely does not say. Add it gradually and stop when the batter mounds on the spoon rather than pouring.
- 8 tablespoons butterThat is half a cup, or one standard stick. Melt and cool it slightly before beating it into the eggs so it does not set into flecks.
- Rigging the steamerGrease a 1 1/2- to 2-quart pudding mold or bowl, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold, and keep the water at a bare simmer.
- Guard against condensationThe cover is the hinge of the whole thing. Steam dripping onto an uncovered batter waterlogs the top and leaves a grey, sodden crust; a well-sealed mold gives an even, springy crumb.
- Top up the waterAn hour of simmering can drop the water level well down the pot. Check every twenty minutes and add boiling — not cold — water, which would drop the temperature and stall the rise.
- Testing and unmoldingAfter an hour a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand five minutes before turning out, or it may tear.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. A steamed batter pudding of this kind is plain by design and expects a sauce — hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla pudding sauce, or simply cream and sugar.
Gold Medal was the flagship brand of the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the firm that eventually became General Mills, though a brand-name call-out of this kind is no proof of promotional origin: such mentions appear equally in community and manuscript cookbooks. Whatever the source, the style here is telegraphic, with the steaming time wedged in among the ingredients and the flour quantity left to the reader's judgment. Steamed puddings themselves are older than the reliable home oven, and they persisted well into the era of the cast-iron range because a covered mold over simmering water needs no temperature control and no watching beyond the water level — useful on a stove where the oven ran hot at the back and cool at the door. The category descends from the British boiled and steamed pudding tradition, which arrived in American kitchens with the earliest cookbooks.