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Cranberry Pudding
Wash a quart of cranberries, place in a two-quart granite ware saucepan with a pint of water, stew until tender, then add sugar to taste. Take a little more than a half pound of flour, add to this a heaping teaspoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of sugar, mix well together while dry, then add sufficient milk or cream to make a stiff batter, and with this cover the boiling cranberries.
Put on the lid of the saucepan and let the pudding cook briskly until the crust is done. Any acid fruits, such as plums, gooseberries, currants or stewed rhubarb, can be used when cranberries are out of season.-Emilia Cowell.
A stovetop steamed pudding: a baking-powder crust cooked in the trapped steam above a pot of stewed fruit. The whole thing succeeds or fails on one point.
- Keep the lid onThe crust cooks in steam, not liquid, and lifting the lid drops the temperature and slackens the rise. Cover it, keep the fruit at a steady boil, and leave it alone; the original says only "until the crust is done," which in practice will be somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes -- the top should be dry and springy and a skewer should come out clean.
- Granite wareEnamelled steel, valued then because it did not react with acidic fruit. Any heavy non-reactive saucepan with a well-fitting lid works; avoid bare cast iron or aluminium, which will pick up a metallic edge from the cranberries.
- A quart of cranberriesAbout a pound, which is roughly one of the 12-ounce bags sold today, measured generously. Frozen berries need no thawing, only a few extra minutes of stewing.
- Flour by weight"A little more than a half pound" is roughly 8 to 9 ounces, about 1 3/4 to 2 cups of all-purpose flour. A heaping teaspoon of baking powder is closer to 2 level teaspoons by modern spoons.
- Sugar to tasteCranberries need a lot: start with 1 cup for a quart of berries and go to 1 1/2 if you want it sweet rather than sharp. Add it after the skins have burst, since sugar added early keeps the berries firm.
- A stiff batterThicker than pancake batter, thin enough to spread with a spoon. Roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of milk to 2 cups of flour; it should mound rather than pour, or it will sink into the fruit.
- Pot sizeTwo quarts is tight for a pound of berries, a pint of water and a crust that will double. Use a three-quart pan and leave a good inch of headroom above the batter.
- SubstitutionsRhubarb especially, and to a lesser degree gooseberries and currants, give off more liquid than cranberries, so cut the added water back or the crust will be soggy underneath.
- YieldSix servings, spooned out crust and fruit together. Cream or a thin custard is a usual period accompaniment.
This is the old English boiled fruit pudding pushed through American convenience: instead of lining a basin with suet paste and steaming it for two hours, a chemically raised batter is dropped straight onto the stewing fruit. Chemical raising agents were commercially available in America from the middle of the nineteenth century, and that is what made the shortcut possible. Cranberries suit the method because they are relentlessly acidic and cheap in a New England autumn, and the note about plums, gooseberries, currants and rhubarb shows how these recipes were understood ot a technique to be applied to whatever the season handed you rather than a fixed dish. The attribution to Emilia Cowell marks it as a contributed recipe, the kind of thing readers sent in and that was printed with the sender's name attached.