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Steamed Chocolate Nut Pudding
2 tablespoons sugar ½ cup flour 5 egg yolks cup sugar 4 tablespoons Lowney's Premium 1 cup finely chopped nuts Chocolate grated ½ cup milk 5 egg whites 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Mix first five ingredients and boil two minutes. Beat yolks of eggs until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar, beat five minutes; add nuts, then add to chocolate mixture. When well blended, cut and fold in the whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Pour into buttered mold and steam one and one half hours. Remove from mold and serve with hard sauce.
The ingredient list here was set in two columns and has been scrambled by transcription, so read it carefully before starting. Sorted out, it is a flour-thickened chocolate paste lightened with a five-egg foam and steamed like an English pudding.
- Reading the ingredient listThe two columns interleave. The left runs: 2 tablespoons sugar, ½ cup flour, 4 tablespoons grated chocolate, ½ cup milk, 1 tablespoon butter — these are the "first five ingredients" that get boiled. The right runs: 5 egg yolks, ⅔ (or ⅓) cup sugar, 1 cup finely chopped nuts, 5 egg whites, ¼ teaspoon salt. The second sugar quantity is lost in the transcription; a scant ⅔ cup suits the quantity of yolks and the unsweetened chocolate.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was plain unsweetened chocolate sold in cakes, meant to be grated rather than chopped. Four tablespoons grated is roughly 1 to 1½ ounces — about one square of modern baking chocolate. Use unsweetened, not semisweet, or the pudding will be cloying.
- The hinge: boil the paste properlyTwo minutes at a true boil is what cooks the raw flour and thickens the base. Whisk constantly over direct heat; it will go from loose to a stiff, glossy paste. Undercook it and the pudding tastes of raw flour and weeps in the mold.
- Cool before combiningThe recipe does not say so, but the boiled paste must come down to warm, not hot, before the yolk-sugar-nut mixture goes in, or the yolks scramble. Whisk a spoonful of paste into the yolks first, then combine.
- Folding"Cut and fold" is the period phrase for what we still call folding: a spatula down through the center, along the bottom, up the side, turning the bowl. The stiff whites are the only leavening in the pudding, so deflating them means a dense, gummy result.
- Steaming setupButter a 1½- to 2-quart mold and fill it no more than two-thirds, as this batter rises. Cover the mold tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, stand it on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Doneness and unmoldingAfter 1½ hours a skewer into the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the mold. Let it rest 10 minutes before turning out, or it will crack.
- Hard sauceThe period accompaniment: butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavored with vanilla, brandy or sherry, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. No cooking involved.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings, depending on the mold. Steamed puddings reheat well — return slices to the steamer for a few minutes rather than microwaving, which toughens them.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and like Baker's and Hershey's promotional books of the same era it exists to put the firm's product into as many recipes as a household could stand. Steamed puddings themselves are inherited straight from the English kitchen, where a batter or suet mixture tied in a cloth or sealed in a mold was cooked in a pot of simmering water — a method that predates reliable home ovens and survived well into the era of the coal range because it needed no careful heat control. The chocolate and the nuts are the American additions here; hard sauce, a creamed butter-and-sugar sauce close kin to English brandy butter, appears constantly as a finish for steamed puddings in American cookbooks of this period.