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Puffs
Two eggs, one cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, one cup of sweet milk, two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, one cup of raisins. Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs, flour and milk, alternately, then raisins rolled in flour. Steam in small cups half an hour.
Serve hot with hard butter sauce flavored with sherry and nutmeg.-Mrs R. P.
Bishop, Los Angeles.
A steamed pudding batter baked in individual cups — closer to a light raisin pudding than a choux puff. The recipe assumes you know how to rig a steamer and how to make hard sauce, neither of which it explains.
- The hinge: steam, do not bakeSet the filled cups on a rack in a deep pot with an inch or two of simmering water, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full 30 minutes. Cover each cup with foil or a square of buttered parchment so condensation from the lid does not soak the tops.
- "Small cups"Custard cups or ramekins of about 6 fl oz, filled two-thirds full. The batter as written fills roughly eight; larger moulds will need 45 minutes or more.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often called for with saleratus. Use whole milk, not buttermilk — the baking powder here does not need acid.
- Baking powder strengthTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is right for a modern double-acting powder. Flour should be all-purpose; two cups is roughly 250-280 g depending on whether it is spooned or scooped and levelled.
- Raisins rolled in flourTossing the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps it suspended rather than sinking to what becomes the top of the turned-out pudding. Worth doing.
- Hard butter sauceHard sauce is uncooked: cream about 1/2 cup butter with 1 to 1 1/2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar, then beat in a tablespoon or two of sherry and a good grating of nutmeg. Chill it firm; it melts over the hot puffs at the table.
- Yield and servingEight small puddings, four to eight servings. Run a knife round each cup and unmould while hot — they set and stick as they cool.
Steamed cup puddings like this were a standing solution to a real constraint: a wood or coal range gave uneven, hard-to-hold oven heat, but a covered pot of simmering water on the top held a steady temperature all afternoon and could sit beside the rest of dinner. The name "puffs" was used loosely in nineteenth-century American cookery, often for small, light, individually moulded batter puddings of this kind rather than for anything related to choux; the same word was also applied to small pastries made with puff paste, so the label alone does not tell you which is meant. Hard sauce \\, butter and sugar creamed cold, spiked with sherry, brandy or rose water \\, is the standard accompaniment to steamed puddings in the English tradition and travelled to America with them; it is generally traced to British Christmas pudding practice, where it is still called brandy butter. The attribution to Mrs. R. P. Bishop of Los Angeles indicates a reader or subscriber contribution, credited by name and town, which is why the instructions assume shared knowledge and skip the parts everyone already knew.