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English Pudding
1 teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cloves teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon mace 34 cups flour Cream butter; add remaining ingredients; pour into buttered mold; steam four hours. Serve with Brandy Sauce or Foamy Sauce.
A steamed spiced pudding of the old English type, cooked in a covered mold in a water bath rather than an oven. The method matters more than the timing.
- The hinge: steam, not boilThe mold sits on a rack in a kettle with boiling water reaching halfway up its side, lid on the kettle. Keep the water at a bare, steady simmer and top it up with boiling water from a kettle so the pudding never chills.
- Seal the moldButter the mold heavily and fill it no more than two-thirds, since the soda will lift the batter. If the mold has no clamped lid, cover with buttered parchment and foil and tie it down; condensation dripping in makes the top gluey.
- Four hours is realLong steaming is what gives these puddings their close, moist crumb, and there is no way to shorten it much. Test with a skewer at three and a half hours; the pudding is done when the skewer comes out clean and the surface springs back.
- SodaThe teaspoon of soda expects an acidic ingredient in the batter -- molasses, sour milk or buttermilk. Without one it will leave a soapy note rather than lightening anything.
- Spice measuresCloves and mace are assertive at this scale; a half teaspoon of cloves is about the upper limit for a pudding of a few cups of flour. Where the original leaves a spice quantity open, err on the low side and add to the sauce instead.
- Creaming without a mixer"Cream butter" here means beating soft butter until pale before the other ingredients go in. Butter straight from the refrigerator will not take air and the pudding will be heavy.
- The saucesBrandy Sauce and Foamy Sauce are cross-referenced, so both presumably appear elsewhere in the book; period versions vary, the brandy sauce typically butter, sugar and spirit and the foamy sauce a sugar-and-egg mixture beaten over hot water. Either wants to be made while the pudding rests in its mold for ten minutes before unmolding.
- KeepingSteamed puddings improve for a day or two wrapped and chilled, and re-steam for 30 to 45 minutes to serve. Slices also reheat well covered in a low oven at 300F.
Steamed puddings were the standard grand dessert of the English winter table, descended from the boiled suet puddings that were once cooked in a floured cloth rather than a tin mold; the mold with its clamped lid was a nineteenth-century convenience that spared cooks the pudding cloth. American cookbooks kept the form under names like "English Pudding," "Plum Pudding" and "Steamed Fig Pudding" long after the technique had been displaced at home by cakes baked in an oven, largely because a steamer is forgiving where an unreliable coal range is not. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house-brand cookbooks of the period it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full complement of general cookery. The pairing with brandy or foamy sauce is traditional: a rich, spirit-laced sauce cutting the density of a pudding that has spent four hours over water.