Home › Desserts-Puddings › Berry Pudding
Berry Pudding
14t salt 7/8 C milk 2½ level t baking powder 1 T butter 1 C berries Sift dry ingredients twice. Work in butter with finger tips. Then add milk and berries. Turn into buttered mold and steam 1½ hours.. Serve with following sauce: 12 C sugar 1 C boiling water Sauce 2 T butter 1/2 C berries Small amount lemon juice 1 T cornstarch Mix sugar and cornstarch. Add water gradually stirring constantly. Boil five minutes. Add fruit. Stir well, remove from fire and add butter. This is delicious with cherries.
Mrs. Charles Greenwood. ¼ C butter ½ C milk
The transcription has lost some of its numbers along the way, and one ingredient entirely. Read the list carefully before you start, because a steamed pudding batter has to be right before it goes into the mold.
- Missing flourA steamed pudding of this type is built on about 2 cups of flour sifted with the salt and baking powder; the flour line has dropped out of the ingredient list. Without it there is nothing for the baking powder to lift.
- Garbled fractions"14t salt" is ¼ teaspoon, and "12 C sugar" in the sauce is ½ cup. The trailing "¼ C butter ½ C milk" appears to be an alternate set of quantities that floated free of the main list — the pudding itself needs 1 tablespoon butter and 7/8 cup milk.
- Steaming timeThe printed page gives 1½ hours, which is what our text now reads. That suits a 1-quart mold of this batter over steadily simmering water; a skewer pushed to the center should come out clean.
- The moldButter the mold well and fill it no more than two-thirds, then cover tightly with a lid or with foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Working in the butterOne tablespoon of butter rubbed into the flour with the fingertips is a biscuit method, not a creaming method. Keep it quick and cool, mix only until the milk is absorbed, then fold the berries in last so they do not bleed through the batter.
- BerriesFresh or well-drained frozen fruit both work. Frozen berries release more liquid, so toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in.
- The sauceMix the sugar and cornstarch dry before adding the boiling water, or it will lump. Five minutes at a boil is right for cornstarch — it needs to reach a full boil to lose its raw taste and set its thickness. The butter goes in off the heat for gloss.
- YieldProbably serves six to eight. Unmold while still hot; a pudding left to cool in the mold is apt to stick.
Steamed puddings were the practical dessert of a kitchen with an unreliable oven and a stove that was already going. A covered mold set in a pot of simmering water cooks gently and forgivingly, and a wood or coal range that could not be trusted to hold an even temperature for an hour could be trusted to keep water boiling. Community cookbooks compiled from members' contributed recipes are full of them — cheap, filling, and easily stretched with whatever fruit the season gave. Mrs. Greenwood's note that it is "delicious with cherries" indicates the fruit was interchangeable.