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Date Pudding (C dates chopped fine C sugar C)
1 C dates (chopped fine) 1 C sugar 1 C graham cracker crumbs 1 C nut meats 1 t baking powder 3 eggs (yolks and whites beaten separately Steam one hour or bake in a slow oven. Serve with either sauce: Sauce No. 1 1 C raisins (ground) 1 C sugar 1 T cornstarch 1 T butter Add a small amount of water to the above ingredients and cook until thick. Flavor with fruit juice.
Sauce No. 2 Yolks 2 eggs ½ pt. cream 1 C sugar Beat sugar and egg yolks together and add the cream whipped stiff just before serving.
Mrs. B. H. Whitman.
A crumb-and-date steamed pudding of the type church committees printed by the hundred: no flour, no butter, and no fat beyond the nuts and eggs. The abbreviations are standard for the period — C is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon.
- The hinge: beat the whites properlyWith no flour and no liquid, the three stiffly beaten whites are the entire leavening structure; the baking powder is a supporting player. Fold them in last, in two or three additions, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- A slow ovenRead that as 300-325F. In a buttered 8-inch square pan or 1½-quart dish the baked version takes roughly 35-45 minutes and is done when the center is set and the top has a dry, cracked crust.
- Steaming one hourButter a 1½- to 2-quart mold or pudding basin, fill it two-thirds, cover tightly with foil or a tied cloth, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates. Steaming gives a moist, dense pudding; baking gives a chewy, more candy-like one.
- Graham cracker crumbsRoughly 6-7 whole rectangular crackers, crushed to coarse sand, makes a cup. Modern grahams are probably sweeter than the plain graham wafers of the period, so the pudding may read distinctly sweet; the cup of sugar can drop to two-thirds without harming the texture.
- Dates and nutsRoughly 5-6 oz of pitted dates chopped fine, and about 4 oz of nut meats — walnuts or pecans suit it. Toss the chopped dates with a spoonful of the crumbs to keep them from clumping.
- Sauce No. 1Ground raisins, sugar, cornstarch and butter with "a small amount of water" is genuinely vague; start with about half a cup of water for the cup of raisins and add more as it thickens. It cooks in about five minutes and will set up firm as it cools, so keep it slack in the pan.
- Sauce No. 2 is uncookedTwo raw egg yolks beaten with sugar and folded into whipped cream, served without heating, is not a preparation to make now — the yolks never reach a temperature that would deal with salmonella. Use Sauce No. 1, or a current recipe for a cooked custard sauce.
- YieldServes six to eight. It is rich, and a small square with sauce is a portion.
Crumb puddings like this one are generally traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, when boxed graham crackers and boxed baking powder had both become pantry staples and cooks discovered that cracker crumbs could stand in for flour entirely. Dates arrived in American grocery stores in quantity around the turn of the century, pressed into blocks or sold loose, and they turn up constantly in church and club cookbooks of the era in exactly this company — dates, nuts, eggs, sugar, crumbs — as a date loaf, date torte, or date pudding, the names largely interchangeable. The dish is also a good example of what a compiled congregational cookbook actually is: a contributor's working shorthand, printed as she wrote it, with C and T and t left unexplained, and with two sauces submitted rather than one.