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Graham Pudding
One cupful of molasses, 1 cupful of sweet milk, 1 egg, 1 cupful of seeded raisins, ½ of a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in the molasses, ½ of a teaspoonful of salt, sufficient sifted graham flour to make a rather stiff drop batter. Pour into a well-greased mold and steam for three hours.
Serve with a hard sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the molasses-and-graham type that filled out cheap dessert courses before the First World War. The method is forgiving; the only real variables are batter consistency and keeping the steam going for the full three hours.
- The batter is the hinge"A rather stiff drop batter" means it falls heavily from a spoon in a lump rather than pouring. Expect roughly 2 to 2½ cups of graham flour, but add it gradually — too much and the pudding steams up dry and dense.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, unbolted, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat flour is the closest match; ordinary fine whole-wheat works but gives a softer, less nutty crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk was the common alternative in these books and reacts differently with the soda. Use whole milk.
- Soda in the molassesHalf a teaspoon of baking soda (saleratus in older texts) stirred into the molasses will foam up as it neutralises the acid. Do that first, in a bowl big enough to take the rise, then proceed.
- The moldA pudding basin, coffee tin or Bundt-style tube mold of about 1½ to 2 quarts, greased and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover the top tightly with greased foil or a cloth tied down so condensation does not soak the surface.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, at a bare simmer. Check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water — running dry is the usual failure. A skewer should come out clean.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, about 1/2 cup butter to 1 to 1½ cups sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well by steaming for 20 to 30 minutes.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer whose 1830s campaign against fine white bread made unbolted wheat meal a moral as much as a culinary choice; by the time this book was printed the flour was widely sold simply as a cheap, filling pantry staple. Steamed puddings of this kind — molasses, milk, an egg, whatever raisins the household had, and enough coarse flour to bind — were a common economical dessert in nineteenth-century American and British kitchens, since a mold on a rack over simmering water cost no oven fuel and could sit beside whatever else was cooking. Molasses rather than sugar points to a low-cost recipe: it was the cheaper sweetener, and the soda stirred into it did double duty as leavening. The hard sauce is the one indulgence, a small quantity of butter and sugar carrying the whole dish.