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Jam Pudding
Three eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of blackberry jam, one-half cup of butter, one dessertspoon of soda dissolved in hot water, one-half cup of sour milk, flour enough to make nearly as thick as cake dough. Bake in a shallow pan and serve hot with the following sauce:
Two-thirds cup of sugar, butter the size of an egg, two tablespoons of hot water, one egg; cream together and set in a pan of hot water until creamy, being careful not to let it curdle. - Mrs O. C.
Zinn, Hastings.
Berry Pudding, Steamed One pint of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt. Make into a soft batter with milk. Put into well-buttered cups a spoon of batter, then one of berries, then another of batter.
Steam.
Two puddings in one entry: a baked blackberry jam cake with a foamy egg sauce, and a much simpler steamed berry pudding in cups. Both are written in the shorthand of a contributor who assumed the reader had made this sort of thing before.
- The soda is the thing to watchA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, and that is a great deal of soda for half a cup of sour milk. Period sour milk was milk that had clabbered on its own, and its acidity would have varied considerably; with cultured buttermilk, one teaspoon is the sensible reading, or the pudding may taste soapy and darken.
- Sour milkUse cultured buttermilk. Milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice works but is thinner and less acidic.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. The pudding's half cup of butter is 8 tablespoons.
- Flour enough"Nearly as thick as cake dough" means a stiff drop batter that mounds on the spoon rather than pouring. Expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups, added gradually — the jam varies in wetness and the quantity is genuinely unspecified.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given because the book assumed a range. Bake at 350F in a shallow pan of about 8 by 8 inches, 30 to 35 minutes, until the centre springs back. Serves 8 to 10.
- The sauce is a foamy sauce, not a hard sauceCreaming sugar, butter and egg together and then warming them over hot water gives a light pouring sauce. Keep the water below a simmer and whisk constantly; the warning about curdling is the whole difficulty. Take it to 160F on a thermometer, which is thick and creamy but well short of scrambled.
- Steamed berry puddingA pint of flour is 2 cups. Butter the cups well, fill them no more than two-thirds, cover each with foil or a tied cloth, and steam in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides for 20 to 25 minutes. Six to eight custard cups' worth.
- BerriesFrozen berries can be used in the steamed pudding without thawing; thawed ones bleed and turn the batter grey. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour first.
This is a community cookbook page in miniature — two recipes crammed into one entry, one signed by Mrs. O. C. Zinn of Hastings, the other left anonymous, both assuming a cook who already knew what cake dough felt like. Sour milk and soda were the standard leavening of the American nineteenth-century kitchen: milk that had clabbered on its own was a daily byproduct rather than a purchase, and soda turned its acid into lift long before baking powder was cheap and reliable. The second recipe, tellingly, calls for baking powder instead, which places the two side by side across a real technological divide. Jam puddings of this kind drew on preserves already in the house, and the foamy sauce — sugar, butter and an egg beaten over hot water — was a simpler alternative to a proper custard.