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Chocolate Raisin Pudding
1½ cups fine cracker crumbs 2½ cups milk + cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup seeded raisins 1/2 cup cocoa, or 2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate melted Soak cracker crumbs in milk, add remaining ingredients, turn into a buttered pudding dish, and steam four hours. Serve either hot or cold with cream sauce. + cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk
A plain steamed cracker pudding of the Indian-pudding family, sweetened with molasses and darkened with cocoa. The transcription has lost several fraction characters, so read the ingredient list with that in mind.
- The missing fractionsWhere the text reads "+ cup molasses" and "cup cocoa" the original almost certainly printed ¼ or ⅓ and ¼ respectively; the sauce's "+ cup butter" is likewise a fraction, most plausibly ¼. Since the amounts are genuinely ambiguous here, start at the low end — ⅓ cup molasses, ¼ cup cocoa — rather than guessing high.
- Cracker crumbsThese are crushed plain soda or water crackers, unsalted or lightly salted, not sweet graham crumbs. Roll them fine; coarse crumbs leave the pudding gritty rather than smooth. About 40 saltines gives 1½ cups.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateAn unsweetened baking chocolate, two squares being 2 oz. Any modern 100% unsweetened baking chocolate substitutes directly; if you use cocoa, natural cocoa is nearer the period product than Dutch-process, though with no leavening in this batter the difference is one of flavour rather than chemistry.
- Steaming, not bakingA "pudding dish" here goes covered into a pot, standing on a rack in water that comes halfway up the sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Butter the dish well and cover it tightly with foil or a tied cloth so condensation does not fall in.
- Four hoursThat is a long steam for a crumb pudding, and it is mostly about setting the egg gently and softening the raisins. A shorter steam may well be enough for a 1½-quart dish; test with a skewer, which should come out clean. Top up the water in the pot as it boils away.
- Seeded raisinsIn this period the term meant raisins with the seeds removed by hand or machine, often muscatels. Modern seedless raisins are the direct replacement; no soaking is needed given the wet batter.
- The cream sauceButter, sugar and milk with no method given. The likeliest reading is to cream the butter and sugar and then beat in the milk, either scalded and stirred to a thin custard-like sauce over low heat, or worked in cold as a hard-sauce-style topping that melts on the hot pudding. Neither version should be boiled hard or it will separate.
- YieldRoughly a 1½-quart pudding, serving six to eight. Leftovers can be reheated by steaming again.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like Baker's and Hershey's promotional cookbooks of the same era it exists to put the firm's product into as many household dishes as possible — hence the specific call for "Lowney's Premium Chocolate" alongside the cocoa, which Lowney's also sold. The pudding itself is older than the chocolate in it: steamed crumb puddings bound with milk, egg and molasses bear a loose family resemblance to the New England Indian pudding and to the many thrifty puddings built on stale bread or cracker, dishes designed for a kettle on the back of a stove rather than an oven. Adding cocoa to that inherited frame is exactly what a chocolate company's cookbook was for, at a time when chocolate had become cheap and common enough to be treated as an everyday flavoring in plain family desserts rather than a luxury confection.