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Boiled Molasses Pudding
1 cupful molasses. 1 cupful sweet milk. 4 cupfuls sifted flour. 1 cupful stoned raisins. 1/2 cupful butter. 1 teaspoonful soda. 1 teaspoonful salt. Boil or steam in a pudding mould. Eat with wine sauce.--Mrs.McG.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort that lived on molasses, flour and whatever dried fruit was in the house. The original gives no time and no temperature, which is the main thing needing filling in.
- Steaming timeThe original gives none. A mould pudding of this size wants roughly two and a half to three hours at a steady simmer. Set the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up, and top up with more boiling water as it drops. It is done when a skewer comes out clean.
- "Sweet milk"This means fresh whole milk, as opposed to the sour or buttermilk that appears elsewhere in the book. Do not substitute buttermilk here without cutting back elsewhere, since the soda is already matched to the acidity of the molasses.
- Molasses, not blackstrapThe molasses intended is ordinary dark cooking molasses or a good sorghum syrup. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what a Virginia kitchen of the 1870s would have had on the shelf.
- The batter is stiffFour cups of flour to two cups of liquid gives something closer to a dough than a batter. That is correct for a boiled pudding, but if it will not drop from the spoon at all, add milk a tablespoon at a time; a bone-dry mixture steams to a brick.
- Stoned raisinsSimply pitted raisins. Modern seedless raisins need no work; toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink to the bottom of the mould.
- The mouldGrease it well and fill it no more than two-thirds, since the soda will lift the pudding. Cover tightly with a lid or with buttered parchment and foil tied down, or the steam will condense into the pudding. A pudding basin or clean coffee tin works as well as a fluted mould.
- SodaOne teaspoon of baking soda, not baking powder. Sift it through the flour rather than dropping it in wet, or you will get dark bitter streaks.
- Wine sauceThe expected accompaniment is a hot sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira, beaten smooth and poured over at the table. A hard sauce, or plain cream, serves the same purpose.
- YieldEnough for about eight. The batter runs to something like six cups, so a mould of two quarts or a little larger is wanted if it is not to be filled past two-thirds. It reheats well by steaming, which is part of why puddings like this were made at all.
Boiled and steamed puddings were the workhorse dessert of English and Anglo-American kitchens before reliable ovens were common: a mould, a pot of water and a fire that needed no watching produced something substantial from cheap staples. Molasses did the sweetening in households where refined sugar was an expense, and in the post-war South it was often sorghum syrup rather than West Indian molasses in the jug. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end as this one does, with initials rather than a name. "Mrs. McG." gives no cooking time at all.