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Graham Pudding (Egg t soda Salt Steam two)
1 egg 1 t soda Salt Steam two hours. Serve with Lemon Sauce: ½ C sugar 1/2 C butter 1 T flour Lemon flavoring Beat all together and pour into 1 C boiling water and boil until thick. Flavor with lemon.
The pudding half of this entry has lost most of its ingredient list in the original printing — only the egg, soda and salt survive, along with the steaming time. The lemon sauce is complete and stands on its own.
- What is missingComparable steamed graham puddings of this period generally combined graham flour with molasses or sour milk and some sweetening or shortening, along with the egg, soda and salt given here, but the quantities on this page are lost. As printed, the proportions cannot be reconstructed; use a full steamed brown-bread or graham pudding recipe and treat this page as the sauce.
- AbbreviationsC is a cup, T a tablespoon, t a teaspoon.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ intact. Modern whole wheat flour is the closest substitute; stone-ground gives the nearer texture.
- The soda needs an acidA teaspoon of soda with no acid leaves a soapy, faintly metallic taste. It was assumed here that molasses, sour milk or buttermilk was in the batter — one of those has to be present for the leavening to work at all.
- SteamingFill a buttered mold or coffee can two-thirds full, cover tightly with foil or a lid, 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; two hours is right for a quart mold, and a skewer should come out clean.
- The lemon sauceOne tablespoon of flour in this quantity of liquid gives a thin, glossy pouring sauce, not a pudding-thick one. Whisk the flour thoroughly into the butter and sugar before it meets the boiling water or it will lump, and simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw starch.
- Flavoring twiceThe sauce calls for lemon flavoring in the mixture and again at the end. Add the second dose off the heat — lemon extract and fresh juice both lose their aroma to prolonged boiling.
- YieldThe pudding's yield cannot be judged from what survives; the sauce makes roughly two cups.
Steamed graham puddings belong to the long American tradition of boiled and steamed batter puddings, cooked in a mold set over water because it needed no oven — a real advantage on a wood or coal range, and the reason such puddings persisted in church and community cookbooks long after cake baking had become routine. The graham part is a legacy of Sylvester Graham, the New England temperance lecturer and dietary reformer whose advocacy in the 1830s led his name to become attached to unsifted whole wheat flour; by 1900 "graham" meant simply coarse whole wheat, its reforming zeal largely forgotten. The sugar-butter-flour lemon sauce here is the standard sweet pudding sauce of the period, appearing under various names in books of this kind.