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Snowball Pudding (C flour t baking powder White)
1 C flour 1 t baking powder White of 1 egg Steam in buttered cups 35 minutes. Serve with following sauce: Strawberry Sauce Crush 1 pt. berries with 2 or 3 T sugar and let stand 1 hour or so. Cream. 1/2 C powdered sugar 1 T soft butter 1 egg yolk Just before serving, mix with berries. Pour over snowballs and serve at once.
Mrs. A. M. Casey. 1 C sugar 1/2 C milk 2 C flour 2 t baking powder
A steamed cup pudding with a crushed-berry sauce, printed in a jumbled state typical of church-society books set from handwritten cards. The pudding itself is ordinary; the sauce is the problem.
- The sauce contains raw egg yolkThe strawberry sauce creams powdered sugar, butter and a raw yolk, then is mixed with berries and poured over hot puddings just before serving. The yolk is never cooked and the brief contact with warm pudding will not bring it anywhere near a safe temperature, so any Salmonella present survives to the plate. Use a current recipe for a dessert sauce if you want one.
- Not the same as an ordinary raw-egg riskRaw egg in a batter that will be steamed or baked is a different matter. Here the egg is the body of an uncooked sauce that is stirred into the macerated berries just before serving and goes to the table without cooking.
- The ingredient list is scrambledThe lines at the end -- 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder -- read as the pudding batter, apparently misplaced below the sauce, which would make the "1 C flour 1 t baking powder" at the top a stray or duplicated fragment. "12 C powdered sugar" in the sauce is almost certainly 1/2 cup.
- Steaming in cupsButtered cups means individual moulds — teacups, custard cups or small tins — filled about two-thirds, covered, and set in a covered pot over simmering water. Thirty-five minutes is right for a cup-sized pudding; a single large mould would take well over an hour.
- Why snowballThe name most likely refers to the shape and the pale colour: only the egg white goes into the batter, so the turned-out puddings are round and white rather than yellow.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; the batter as reconstructed would probably fill six to eight cups.
Steamed cup puddings were a mainstay of American church-supper dessert sections well into the twentieth century, since they cook on the stovetop, need no oven watching, and portion themselves. "Snowball" was a common name for a small white steamed or boiled pudding, sometimes dredged in coconut to complete the effect. The sauce here belongs to a family of uncooked creamed-butter-and-sugar dessert sauces -- hard sauce and its softer relatives -- that were standard accompaniments to steamed puddings; adding a yolk for richness and body was unremarkable at a time when the connection between raw egg and enteric illness was not part of ordinary household knowledge. Community cookbooks of this kind were commonly compiled from members' handwritten cards, which may explain why the ingredient lines here have ended up out of order.