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Grapenut Pudding
1 C grapenuts 1½ C milk 2 T sugar Salt 1 C seedless raisins Gladys Suydam.
Put in double cooker and steam 10 minutes. Serve with sour sauce. Mrs. C. L. Thomson.
A five-ingredient church-supper pudding that depends entirely on the cereal absorbing the milk. The whole method is one line, so most of the work is filling in what the original assumed.
- Grape-Nuts, then and nowThe cereal is still made and still behaves the same way: hard nuggets that swell and soften in liquid. One cup is roughly 4 oz. Nothing else substitutes cleanly, since the pudding's body comes from the nuggets absorbing the milk rather than from egg or starch.
- Double cookerThat is a double boiler. Assemble the mixture in the upper pan, set it over simmering water in the lower, and cover. "Steam" here means gentle indirect heat, not a steamer basket.
- Ten minutes is shortThe timing works only if the Grape-Nuts have already begun to soften. Let the cereal, milk, sugar and raisins stand together off the heat for 10-15 minutes before the pan goes over the water, or the pudding comes out gritty in the centre.
- SaltNo quantity is given, as is common in books of this kind. A generous pinch, about 1/8 teaspoon, is a reasonable reading; it sharpens the milk and the raisins rather than seasoning the dish.
- Milk1½ cups of whole milk. Anything lower in fat leaves the pudding thin and slightly chalky once the cereal has taken up the liquid.
- Sour sauceRead as a tart pudding sauce rather than a sweet one; period tart sauces of this kind are typically thickened and sharpened with lemon juice or vinegar, but the recipe gives no formula. It assumes the cook already has one; check the sauce section of the same book if it has one.
- YieldServes three, four if the sauce is generous. It is easily doubled, though a doubled batch will need longer over the water.
- The two namesThe ingredient list and the method carry different names. Read it as one recipe, not two; why two contributors are attached to it is not recoverable from the page.
Grape-Nuts was introduced by C. W. Post in the late 1890s and was aggressively marketed as a health food, which is largely why it turns up in dessert sections of church and club cookbooks well into the twentieth century: a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple with a wholesome reputation, pressed into service as a pudding base in place of bread or rice. The technique is the older one of the milk-and-starch steamed pudding, with a manufactured cereal standing in for stale bread. Community cookbooks of this kind were commonly compiled and sold as fundraisers, with recipes signed by their contributors, which is why the page reads as a list of names as much as a list of dishes.