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Strawberry Batter Pudding
1 pint strawberries 1 pint (2 cups) milk 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter 1½ pints (3 cups) flour 3 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful strawberry extract Hard sauce Add the milk gradually to the flour, add the eggs well beaten, salt, baking powder, and butter. Dredge the strawberries with flour, stir them into the batter, add the strawberry extract, and turn into a buttered earthenware dish. Cover and steam for three hours.
Serve with hard sauce.
A steamed batter pudding of the old English type, thickened with a great deal of flour and cooked in a covered earthenware dish set in water. A few of the quantities need reading carefully before you begin.
- The hinge: steam, do not bakeCovered and set over or in simmering water, the batter sets slowly and stays moist. The same dish in dry oven heat for three hours would give you a brick. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up so it never boils dry.
- How to rig the steamerButter a 2-quart earthenware or ceramic dish, cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, and stand it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. A large stockpot or a roasting pan with a lid both work.
- Flour by volumeThree cups of flour to two cups of milk gives a very stiff, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one, which is what holds the berries in suspension. If it will not fall from the spoon at all, add milk a spoonful at a time; do not thin it to pancake consistency.
- The saltOne and a half teaspoonfuls of salt in a sweet pudding is high by modern taste, and the recipe carries no sugar at all beyond what the hard sauce supplies. Half a teaspoon of salt is more usual now, and you may prefer to add sugar to the batter.
- Baking powder in a steamed puddingA single teaspoon for three cups of flour is a light hand, and three hours of gentle steam sets the batter before much lift is lost. Use double-acting powder and get the pudding into the steam promptly once the liquid is in.
- Dredging the berriesTossing the hulled strawberries in flour before folding them in helps keep them from sinking and limits juice streaking through the batter. Halve or quarter large modern berries; a pint is about 12 oz.
- Strawberry extractThe extract was presumably there to reinforce fruit that loses colour and scent in long cooking. It is easy to overdo with current extracts, which are strong and often frankly artificial; a teaspoon of good vanilla, or the extract cut to half a teaspoon, reads better.
- Hard sauceGiven elsewhere in books of this era and not repeated here: butter creamed with roughly two to three times its volume of powdered sugar and flavoured, then chilled firm so it melts over the hot pudding.
- Yield and donenessServes six to eight. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy, not wet, under the lid; unmould onto a warm dish and serve at once.
Steamed batter puddings were the English kitchen's answer to a long, unattended cooking day: flour, milk and eggs in a covered pot of water, set going in the morning and turned out at dinner. The strawberry version belongs to the same period habit of pushing a summer fruit into a year-round formula with the help of bottled extract, which stood in for berries that had lost their perfume over three hours of steam.