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Cherry Pudding
Cherries fresh or preserved 1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) butter 1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) sugar 1/4 lb. (I cup) flour Lemon rind 3 eggs 1/2 pint (I cup) whipped cream Line a buttered earthenware dish thickly with fresh or preserved cherries. Beat the butter and sugar till creamy, then beat in the yolks of the eggs, then add the grated rind of half a lemon, the flour, and the whites of the eggs stiffly beaten.
Cover with a buttered paper and steam steadily for two hours. Serve with whipped and sweetened cream.
A plain steamed sponge baked over cherries — essentially a creamed butter cake set upside down on fruit and cooked in a water bath rather than an oven. The batter is stiff and eggs are the only leavening, so the beating matters more than anything else here.
- The hinge: whipped whitesThere is no baking powder and no added liquid. The three stiffly beaten whites are the entire lift, so fold them in last and stop as soon as the streaks disappear. Overworked whites give a dense, gummy pudding after two hours of steam.
- Weights, not cupsThe quarter-pound figures are the reliable ones: 115 g each of butter, sugar and flour. The cup equivalents given track modern measures closely (a cup of flour is usually reckoned at 4 to 4 1/2 oz), but weigh if you can.
- Half a pint of creamWritten as 1 cup, which is an American half-pint. If you are working from a British half-pint (10 fl oz), you will simply have more cream than you need, which is no hardship.
- How to steam itCover the dish with buttered parchment (foil over the top holds it better than the original's buttered paper), set it on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Two hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. A dense creamed batter of this depth genuinely needs the full two hours; test with a skewer at the centre, which should come out clean and the sponge spring back.
- The cherriesFresh cherries must be stoned. 'Preserved' here most likely means bottled or jarred in syrup rather than glace; if so, drain them well, or the syrup will thin the base into a sauce and soak the sponge from below.
- Earthenware and thermal shockThe book assumes a glazed earthenware dish, which suits gentle steaming well. Do not lower a cold stoneware dish into fully boiling water or set a hot one on a cold surface afterwards; both invite cracking. A pudding basin works identically.
- Turning out and yieldRest five minutes, run a knife round, and invert so the cherries sit on top. It serves six modestly, four generously, and is best warm with the sweetened cream.
Steamed puddings of this shape — creamed butter, sugar, eggs and flour set over fruit in a basin — were common in British domestic cookery through the nineteenth century, when a pudding could be kept going over the fire alongside the rest of the meal without needing oven space. The lemon rind here does the work that vanilla would in a later recipe: citrus zest was a common flavouring in English sponges before vanilla extract became cheap and general. The instruction to cover with buttered paper predates foil, and its purpose is unchanged — to keep condensation off the surface of the sponge.