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Cherry Batter Pudding
An easily made cherry pudding calls for 2 eggs well beaten; to these add 1 cupful of milk, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of sugar and sufficient sifted flour to make a thick drop batter. Beat well for a moment, add I level teaspoonful of baking-powder and 1 cupful of stoned cherries. Turn into a well-buttered mold and steam for two hours, serving it with either a hard or soft sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort that used up whatever fruit was on hand. The one number the original withholds is the flour, so read the batter rather than the recipe.
- "A thick drop batter"With 2 eggs and 1 cup milk this lands around 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of flour thick enough that a spoonful falls off in a lump rather than pouring. Err on the loose side; a stiff batter steams into something closer to dumpling than pudding.
- Baking powder in 1900Baking powder of the period -- Older powders were often single-acting and weaker than what you buy now. One level teaspoon for this quantity of flour is on the low side by modern standards but works because steam is a gentle, prolonged leavener. The recipe adds it last, after the beating; follow that order rather than mixing it in early and letting the batter stand.
- The moldA 1-quart pudding basin, a straight-sided metal mold, or a well-buttered coffee tin. Fill no more than two-thirds and cover the top tightly with buttered foil or a cloth tied under the rim, or condensation will drip in and make the surface sodden.
- Steaming setupStand the mold on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates the pot must not run dry over two hours.
- Two hours is not negotiable downwardTiming -- Steamed batters climb in temperature slowly, so do not cut the time short by much. A skewer into the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the mold; a small mold may be done at about 1 1/2 hours, but a full quart wants the two.
- The cherries"Stoned" simply means pitted. The recipe does not say which sort; sour pie cherries suit the barely sweetened batter -- there is only a tablespoon of sugar here, so the sauce carries the sweetness. Drained canned or thawed frozen cherries work; pat them dry and toss with a spoonful of the flour so they do not sink.
- Hard and soft sauceHard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, flavored with vanilla or spirits, served cold so it melts into the hot pudding. Soft sauce is a thin pourable custard or a sweetened, thickened milk sauce. Either is expected, not optional the pudding itself is deliberately bland.
- YieldServes four to six. It unmolds best after five minutes' rest, and reheats well by steaming again for 20 minutes.
Steamed batter puddings belong to the long English tradition that produced spotted dick and plum pudding, and they survived in American cookery precisely because they are cheap: two eggs, a cup of milk, flour, and whatever fruit was cheap or over-ripe. Boiling or steaming a pudding in a cloth or mold predates the reliable home oven, and the method lingered in books like this one because it needs only a pot, a lid, and a back burner no fuel spent heating an oven for a single dish. The near-absence of sugar in the batter is the tell of an economy recipe: sweetness was pushed into the sauce, where a small amount of sugar goes further and can be adjusted to what the household has. Cherries appear across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American dessert chapters, a frequency often attributed to the prevalence of sour cherry trees in dooryards and to a short, glut-like season that had to be used quickly or canned.