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Blackberry Pudding
To make a blackberry pudding, soak two cups of stale bread crumbs in two cups of milk, add a little salt and three well-beaten eggs. Measure one and one-half cups of sifted flour and stir into it half a teaspoon of baking powder, and add to the other ingredients one and one-half pints of blackberries. Put into a buttered pudding dish and steam two hours. Serve with a rich sauce. -Mrs E. C. Gardner.
A plain steamed pudding of the kind that stretched a bowl of berries across a family table. Nothing in it is difficult, but two details of the original will trip up a modern cook: there is no sugar in the batter, and "steam" means a covered dish set in simmering water, not a steamer basket.
- No sugar is not an errorThe batter contains no sugar; the sweetening would have come from the sauce poured over it. If you intend to serve it with something restrained, such as lightly whipped cream, expect a scone-like result rather than a dessert.
- What "a rich sauce" meantCommon accompaniments for a steamed fruit pudding of this era include hard sauce (butter creamed with powdered sugar and a spoon of brandy or vanilla), a foamy egg sauce, or a thin sweetened cream. Any of these supplies the missing sugar.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dry crumbs absorb far more milk and will give a heavy, pasty pudding.
- How to steam itButter a 2-quart pudding basin or deep dish, fill no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a large pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it falls.
- Berry quantityOne and one-half pints is about 3 cups, roughly 15 ounces. Frozen berries work if added still frozen and undrained juice is allowed for; thawed ones bleed and turn the crumb purple and slack.
- Timing and donenessTwo hours is right for a full 2-quart basin. Test with a thin skewer at the centre: it should come out clean of batter, though berry juice will cling. Let the pudding stand ten minutes before turning out or it may collapse.
- LeaveningHalf a teaspoon of baking powder to a cup and a half of flour is a light hand by modern standards, but a steamed pudding rises mostly on the beaten eggs and steam. Do not increase it; more will make the pudding coarse and prone to sinking.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well, covered, with another twenty minutes of steaming.
Steamed puddings like this one were the workhorse dessert of nineteenth-century American and British kitchens: they needed no oven, occupied a single burner or the back of a range, and could be built from stale bread, a little flour and whatever fruit was in season. Blackberries were among the cheapest of that fruit, since across much of the eastern United States they were gathered wild from hedgerows and fence lines rather than bought. The recipe carries a contributor's name, Mrs E. C. Gardner. The batter itself is unsweetened, the sweetening belonging instead to the sauce of butter, powdered sugar and brandy, where a cook could be as generous or as frugal as the household allowed.