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Snowball Pudding (Pinch salt C butter Whites)
1 C sugar. 1/2 C milk. 2 C flour. 2 t baking powder. Pinch salt 1/2 C butter Whites 4 eggs, beaten stiff Combine above ingredients, place about 1 T in each buttered jelly glass and steam 1/2 hour. Roll in powdered sugar and serve with crushed strawberries, top with whipped cream flavored with vanilla and sugar.
Mrs. H. Good.
A community-cookbook entry transcribed in shorthand, and the ingredient list has clearly been clipped along the way. Read the notes before you assemble anything.
- The list is incompleteSalt, butter and four beaten egg whites will not steam into a pudding — there is no flour, sugar or liquid to set. Puddings of this kind were generally built on a cake-type batter of flour, sugar, milk and a raising agent, with the whites folded in last, though proportions varied from book to book. Treat the printed list as a fragment and work from a full steamed-pudding formula.
- C and TC is a cup, T a level tablespoon. Half a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz.
- Jelly glassesThese were small straight-sided tumblers used for potting jam, about 6 to 8 oz. Ordinary drinking glass is not tempered and can crack in a steamer; use buttered ramekins, dariole moulds or custard cups of similar size.
- How to steamStand the filled moulds on a rack in a deep pan, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, cover the pan and hold at a bare simmer. Half an hour suits a mould filled no more than two-thirds; a heaped tablespoon of batter will be done well inside that.
- Rolling in sugarTurn the puddings out while hot and roll them at once — powdered sugar clings to the damp surface and gives the white, snowball finish the name promises. Cooled puddings shed it.
- StrawberriesCrushed strawberries here means berries mashed with sugar and left to stand until syrupy, not a cooked sauce. Half an hour at room temperature is enough.
- YieldThe recipe puts only about a tablespoon in each glass, which at that measure would fill a good many small moulds; since the ingredient list is incomplete, no firm serving count can be given.
Community cookbooks of this kind were compiled from cards handed in by contributors — which is why the entry carries Mrs. H. Good's name and why the measurements are abbreviated to the point of collapse. The contributor knew what went into her pudding and saw no reason to spell it out. Steamed puddings in individual moulds were common on American dessert tables through the later nineteenth century, since a covered pot on the range needed no oven. The name is descriptive rather than historical: a small white dome, turned out and rolled in powdered sugar, sitting in red fruit. Strawberries and whipped cream suggest a late-spring or summer dish.