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Date Pudding (Egg T butter C sugar C walnuts)
1 egg 1 T butter 1 C sugar 1 C walnuts 1 C bread crumbs 1/2 t vanilla 1 t baking powder 1 C sweet milk 1 C chopped dates Cream together egg, butter and sugar. Add milk, chopped dates, walnuts and bread crumbs. greased pan. Set pan in a moderate oven 40 minutes. Serve with lemon sauce.
Add vanilla and baking powder. Pour in larger pan of boiling water and bake in ¾ C sugar 1 T cornstarch Lemon Sauce 1½ C boiling water 2 T butter 1/8 t salt Grated rind and juice 1 lemon Mix sugar and cornstarch, also salt; then slowly add boiling water. Let it come to a boil, remove from fire and add butter and grated rind and juice of lemon. • Jessie Ray. 1 C sugar 1 T butter 1 egg 1½ C flour 1 C chopped dates
A steamed-style crumb pudding baked in a water bath, of the sort that turned stale bread and a handful of dates into dessert. The instructions arrived out of order, so read the whole method before starting.
- Order of workCream egg, butter and sugar; add milk, dates, walnuts and crumbs; then stir in the vanilla and baking powder last. Pour into a greased pan, set that pan inside a larger one of boiling water, and bake.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F (the term covered roughly 350-375F). A water bath keeps the custardy crumb mixture from setting hard at the edges, so do not raise the heat to hurry it.
- Pan size and donenessThe recipe does not specify a dish; an 8-inch square holds it comfortably. Forty minutes is right for a shallow pan; a deeper one may want an hour. Test with a knife in the centre.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more milk and give a pasty pudding. Tear the bread and pulse it briefly, or rub it through your fingers.
- Sweet milkSimply ordinary whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened baking.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon, t teaspoon, C cup. The sauce calls for three-quarters of a cup of sugar.
- Lemon sauceWhisk the cornstarch into the dry sugar and salt before the boiling water goes in, or it will lump. Boil it briefly to lose the starchy taste, then take it off the heat before the butter and lemon so the juice does not thin the thickening.
- YieldSix modest servings, warm, with the sauce poured over at the table.
Community cookbooks from the 1910s and 1920s are full of date puddings, and part of the reason may be commercial: dried dates, most of them imported from the Persian Gulf, with California cultivation developing from the early 1900s, became a staple of the American grocery. The pudding itself is older in form -- a bread-crumb batter baked in a water bath is a direct descendant of the English boiled and steamed puddings, adapted to an oven rather than a pudding cloth. The lemon sauce is the standard partner of the era, its sharpness set against a very sweet, very dense pudding, and the same sauce appears under cottage pudding and apple roll in books of this kind.