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Blueberry Pudding
Beat two eggs light and stir into them one cup of milk and sifted flour enough to make a batter as thick as for pancakes.
Put into the flour three teaspoons of baking powder. Butter a mold and put a layer of batter in the bottom, then a layer of blueberries. Alternate the layers until the mold is three-quarters full, cover it closely, and boil one hour.
Serve with a rich sauce.
A steamed pudding in the older sense: the mold sits in a kettle of boiling water, not in the oven. Everything depends on keeping that water at a steady simmer and the mold sealed.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" in a mold -- Recipes of this sort set the sealed mold in boiling water rather than in the oven; whether the mold was half-submerged or fully immersed varied. Setting the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water coming halfway up its sides works well: keep it at a lively simmer for the full hour and top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the level never drops below the halfway mark.
- How much flourThe recipe gives none, only a consistency. With two eggs and one cup of milk, pancake-batter thickness will take somewhere in the range of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sifted flour; add it gradually and stop when the batter pours slowly but steadily. Three teaspoons of baking powder is generous by modern standards for that quantity of flour.
- Filling the moldLeave the top quarter empty as directed: the batter rises as it steams, and a mold filled higher risks forcing the batter up against the cover.
- Sealing it"Cover closely" meant a fitted lid or a floured cloth tied down with string. Buttered parchment under a sheet of foil, crimped tight around the rim, does the same job of keeping condensation off the surface.
- Keeping the berries suspendedTossing the blueberries in a spoonful of the measured flour before layering helps them stay put rather than sinking into the batter and collapsing into the base.
- DonenessThe recipe does not state a mold size; one hour suits a smallish mold, and a larger or deeper one will want longer. A skewer into the center should come out clean of batter, though it will be stained purple. Let the pudding stand ten minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- The rich saucePeriod practice would be hard sauce (butter creamed with confectioners' sugar), a thin vanilla custard, or a lemon sauce thickened with cornstarch. Any of these still works; the pudding itself is barely sweet and needs one.
- YieldA quart-sized mold gives about six modest portions. It is best warm; reheat leftover slices by steaming briefly.
Boiled and steamed puddings were the standard hot dessert of English and American kitchens for centuries, worked in a cloth or a tin mold over the fire because a reliable oven was the exception rather than the rule. What dates this particular version is the baking powder: three teaspoons of a chemical leaven doing work that earlier cooks got from long beating or yeast, and doing it in a batter light enough to be layered with fruit. Commercial baking powders spread through American cookery from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and before long they were assumed in every cupboard. Blueberries are the native contribution here, gathered wild across New England and the upper Midwest in high summer and folded into whatever the household happened to be steaming that week.