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Sailor's Duff Pudding
1 egg 1/2 C molasses 2 T sugar 2 T melted lard.
1½ C flour 1 t soda Mrs. Edgar Wells. 1/2 C boiling water, added last Steam one hour in pan with tube in center. Serve with any kind of pudding sauce, or sweetened whipped cream.
Christina D. Kern.
Mrs. R. F. Wright. 2 C flour
This entry has come down to us badly collated: two flour quantities, two contributor names, and no sign of the molasses, fat, salt or egg that a sailor's duff requires. Read it as a fragment of a known dish rather than a working formula, and be aware that the amounts below the flour line are genuinely ambiguous.
- What is missingA duff of this type is built on molasses, which supplies both the sweetening and the acid that activates the soda. With only flour, soda and boiling water listed, the printed text cannot produce a pudding. Anyone wanting to make it will need a complete recipe for steamed molasses duff.
- Two flour measuresThe page gives both 1½ cups and 2 cups of flour. Three contributors' names also appear, so it looks as though more than one submission has been run together somewhere between slip and printed page, though how is guesswork. There is no way to tell which flour quantity belongs with the half cup of boiling water.
- Soda"1 t soda" is one teaspoon of baking soda, not baking powder. In period puddings it was paired with molasses or sour milk; used alone with plain water it will leave a soapy taste.
- Boiling water added lastThe recipe says only that the hot water goes in at the end; the likely reason is to slacken a stiff batter and start the soda working. Once it goes in the batter should reach the steamer promptly.
- The pan with a tube in the centerA tube pan, or a ring mold. The central column carries heat into the middle of a dense batter so it cooks through without a raw core. A modern angel-food or Bundt-style tin covered tightly with foil works the same way; set it on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides.
- Steaming timeThe recipe says one hour. Since the flour quantity is ambiguous, so is the depth of batter in the mould: test with a skewer at the thickest part and keep the water at a steady low boil, topping it up with more boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- ServingThe book leaves the sauce open: 'any kind of pudding sauce, or sweetened whipped cream'. A hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon pudding sauce, or sweetened whipped cream all belong to the tradition; the pudding itself is not very sweet, so the sauce carries it. Turn it out warm and cut in wedges; no yield can be given from the text as printed.
"Duff" is a dialect pronunciation of dough, recorded in northern English and Scots and carried into American seafaring speech, where it came to mean any boiled or steamed flour pudding made in a cloth or a pot. Aboard ship it was often said to be the treat of the week, cheap in ingredients and forgiving of a galley with no oven: flour, molasses, suet or drippings, soda in place of yeast, and a long spell over steam. Plum duff had raisins; a plain sailor's duff had molasses and little else. In time the dish came ashore as a homely winter dessert, dressed up with a tube pan and a sauce. That three women's names cling to one mangled set of measurements is itself characteristic of the genre.