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Steamed Cranberry Pudding
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 3 1/2 cups flour 1 1/4 tablespoons baking powder 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups cranberries Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Mix and sift flour and baking powder and add alternately with milk to first mixture, stir in berries, turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam three hours. Serve with thin cream, sweetened and flavored with nutmeg.
A plain steamed pudding of the New England type, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast or suet. The batter is much stiffer than a cake batter, and that is intentional.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerThe mould sits on a rack in a covered kettle with boiling water reaching halfway up its side. Keep it at a lazy simmer and top up with boiling water as it evaporates; a hard rolling boil drives water past the cover and into the pudding.
- Mould and fillingA 2-quart or larger pudding mould or straight-sided metal bowl; this quantity of stiff batter and berries will more than fill a smaller one to two-thirds. Butter it well, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with the lid or with buttered foil tied down, so condensation cannot drip in.
- Three hours is not a misprintSteam heat only reaches 212F, so a dense pudding of this size genuinely needs the full three hours the recipe calls for. Test with a skewer at the center; it should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides.
- Baking powder1 1/4 tablespoons is a little under 4 teaspoons, which is right for 3 1/2 cups of flour. Use a double-acting powder and do not let the batter stand about, as the second rise should happen in the steam.
- The batter will be thickWith 3 1/2 cups flour to only 1/2 cup milk this is closer to a soft dough than a pour-able batter. Spoon it into the mould and smooth the top rather than expecting it to level itself.
- CranberriesFresh or frozen both work; frozen should go in unthawed and straight from the bag. Halving the larger berries and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking to one end.
- "Thin cream"That means light or single cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat. Sweeten to taste, grate nutmeg over it, and serve it cold against the hot pudding; half-and-half is the closest supermarket stand-in.
- YieldServes eight generously. It reheats well by steaming the sliced pudding for 15 minutes, or covered in a low oven at 300F.