Troy Pudding
1 cupful of milk. 1 cupful of molasses. 1/2 1/2 cupful of currants. 1/2 cupful of butter. 1 teaspoonful of baking soda, dissolved in the milk. 1 teaspoonful of ginger. 1 teaspoonful of ground cloves.
Enough flour to make it as stiff as soft gingerbread. Put it in a mould, and steam four hours. If no steamer is at hand, tie the mould in a cloth and boil four hours.
Sauce: One egg (frothed), one cupful of powdered sugar, one cupful of cream or milk, boiled with a small piece of butter. Add wine, if you like.--Mrs. W.C.R.
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the sort every nineteenth-century household kept in rotation. The recipe assumes you know what soft gingerbread batter feels like, which is the only real obstacle.
- The flour is the whole trick"As stiff as soft gingerbread" means a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring. The original gives no quantity and none can be safely inferred from these liquids — add it gradually and stop by feel. Too much flour and four hours of steam produces a brick.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants and not raisins. Half a cup is about 2 1/2 ounces; toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Butter and molassesSoften or melt the butter before mixing; a half cup of cold butter will not incorporate into a batter this wet. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is too bitter here.
- Soda in the milkDissolving the soda in the milk rather than the flour is deliberate: it reacts with the acid in the molasses. Mix and get the pudding into the mould promptly, since the lift begins immediately and there is no baking powder to carry it.
- The mouldButter it well and fill no more than two-thirds, then cover tightly with a lid or with buttered foil tied down. A 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or a coffee can works. Set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides and top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Four hours is not an exaggerationSteamed puddings cook by slow moist heat and this one is dense with molasses; the long time is what gives it its dark, close crumb. A skewer should come out clean and the centre should read about 200F.
- The sauceBeat the egg with the sugar, then pour the boiled cream and butter over it in a thin stream while whisking, and return it to low heat only until it thickens slightly — about 160F. Boiling it after the egg goes in will curdle it. If adding wine, a sherry or madeira, stirred in off the heat to taste.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well: steam slices or the whole unmoulded pudding for 20 to 30 minutes, and make the sauce fresh.
Steamed and boiled puddings were the backbone of nineteenth-century dessert cookery because they needed no oven — a pot of water over any fire would do, which mattered in kitchens where the oven was a temperamental part of a wood or coal range and was often committed to bread. Molasses, ginger and cloves put this squarely in the gingerbread family; the spices were cheap and shelf-stable, and molasses was the everyday sweetener in American households well into the century, sugar being the more expensive choice reserved here for the sauce. The name is presumably a place name, as many of these puddings were, though *Housekeeping in Old Virginia* (1879) gives no explanation and offers the recipe simply as it came from a contributor. The book was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from recipes solicited from Virginia housekeepers, and initials like "Mrs. W.C.R." run throughout — a community cookbook in all but name.