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Steamed Cup Pudding
Make a batter of one cup of milk, one egg, one teaspoon of Larkin Baking Powder, one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt, one and one-half cups of flour. Put any desired fruit into a well-buttered cup, cover with the batter and steam twenty minutes. Serve with a sauce.
A plain steamed batter pudding built to be assembled in individual cups, from a cookbook written to sell one company's baking powder and salt. It works, but two details in the original need adjusting.
- Raising power is shortOne teaspoon of baking powder for one and a half cups of flour is light by modern proportions, which generally call for a teaspoon or more per cup of flour. Use 2 teaspoons for a batter that climbs properly in the steam.
- What "a cup" means hereThe measuring cup is a standard 8 oz cup. The vessel is something else: a teacup, custard cup or ramekin of roughly 5 to 6 oz. Butter it thoroughly and fill no more than two-thirds, since the batter rises as it steams.
- There is no sugar in the batterSweetness was presumably meant to come from the fruit at the bottom and from the sauce poured over at the table. If you intend to eat it plain, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar.
- Steaming setupSet the filled cups on a rack in a pot with an inch or two of simmering water, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer so it does not boil into the cups. Cover each cup with buttered foil or a small plate if your pot lid drips.
- Twenty minutes is for small cups onlyIndividual 5 to 6 oz cups will be set in 20 to 25 minutes. Anything larger, such as a single pint basin, needs 45 minutes to an hour. Test with a skewer in the batter, not in the fruit layer.
- Fruit that behavesFirm fruit works best: sliced apple, pitted cherries, plums, blueberries, or drained canned fruit. Very juicy fruit floods the cup and leaves the batter slack underneath; toss it with a teaspoon of flour first.
- SauceThe book assumes you know what to reach for. A hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon pudding sauce, or plain cream all suit it.
- YieldThe batter fills about four to six cups of this size, depending on how much fruit goes in first.
Steamed cup puddings are the small, quick end of the British steamed-pudding tradition, which survived in American home cooking long after cakes moved to the oven, often said to be because a pot of simmering water was more predictable than a wood or coal range with no thermostat. What dates this particular version is the branding: the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, sold soap and household goods by mail and built its business on premiums, shipping catalogues and recipe booklets that named Larkin baking powder and Larkin table salt in the ingredient list itself. Recipes like this one were advertising as much as instruction, which explains the terse phrasing and the vagueness about the fruit and the sauce, both left to the cook while the branded goods are specified to the quarter teaspoon.