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Molasses Pudding
1 cupful molasses. 1/2 1/2 cupful butter and lard mixed. 1 cup not quite full of buttermilk. 3 eggs. 1 teaspoonful soda.
Flour enough to make it as thick as cake batter. If you wish to eat it cold, add another cup of sugar. Bake it quickly.-Mrs. M. S. C. Molasses Pudding. 1 teacup sugar. 1 teacup butter. 2 teacups molasses. 2 teacups flour. 4 eggs. 1 tablespoonful ginger. 1 teaspoonful soda dissolved in a few spoonfuls of buttermilk Eat with sauce. Excellent.
Molasses Pudding. 9 eggs. 4 cupfuls molasses. 1 teacup butter. Bake in a paste.-Mrs. P. W.
Three separate contributions collected under one heading, none of them with a pan size, temperature or time. All three are essentially baked gingerbread-puddings in the Southern manner, and the third is a pie filling rather than a batter.
- The hinge: soda and molassesThe soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses and buttermilk, and it starts working the moment it is mixed. Get the batter into a buttered dish and into an already-hot oven without delay, or the lift is gone before it bakes.
- "Bake it quickly"A quick oven is usually reckoned somewhere in the region of 400-450F. For a molasses batter that is hot enough to scorch, so treat it as a starting heat: give it 10 minutes hot and drop to 350F, or bake the whole thing at 350-375F and expect 35-45 minutes for a 9-inch square dish.
- Teacup and cupfulA period teacup runs about 3/4 cup, a "cupful" a full 8 ounces. The second recipe reads as a very rich, wet cake batter either way; measure by weight if you can and add flour until it mounds on the spoon.
- "Butter and lard mixed"The recipe does not give the proportion; taken as equal parts that is 1/4 cup each. Lard was a common everyday fat and gives a shorter crumb; all butter works and browns more.
- Molasses to useBuy unsulphured cane molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than the West Indies or sorghum syrup a Virginia kitchen would have had in 1878, and 2 to 4 cups of it will overwhelm the dish.
- "Flour enough"For the first recipe, start with about 2 cups and add by the spoonful. Cake batter here means it pours thickly and slowly off the spoon, not that it drops in clumps.
- Bake in a pasteThe third recipe is a filling: 9 eggs and 4 cups molasses will fill two deep 9-inch pastry shells generously, or three shallow ones. Bake at 350F until the centre is set with only a slight wobble, roughly 40-50 minutes, and cool before cutting or it will run.
- Sauce and serving"Eat with sauce" means a sweet pudding sauce -- hard sauce, or a thin butter-and-sugar sauce with a little nutmeg or brandy. Each of the batter puddings serves 8 to 10, and both are better slightly warm than hot.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from the manuscript receipts of some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why three unrelated molasses puddings sit stacked here under one heading, each signed with initials and none reconciled with the others. Molasses earned that kind of repetition honestly: in the postbellum South it was the cheap sweetener, cane syrup from the Gulf and West Indies trade or sorghum boiled off closer to home, while refined white sugar remained an expense to be spent by the teacup rather than the pound. The pairing with soda and buttermilk is older than baking powder in American kitchens -- acid syrup and alkali were how a batter rose before commercial leaveners were common -- and the ginger in the second version marks it as kin to the gingerbreads and "molasses cakes" that ran through nineteenth-century household books on both sides of the Atlantic.