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Steamed Cottage Pudding
Prepare the same as Cottage Pudding. Pour into buttered mold; steam one and one half hours. Serve with lemon or strawberry sauce.
Indian Pudding, Steamed 1 cup corn meal 1 cup sour milk ½ cup molasses cup chopped suet 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda few grains ginger Mix soda with sour milk, add other ingredients, pour into buttered mold, and steam four hours. Serve with molasses sauce.
Two steamed puddings, both built on the same method: a stiff batter sealed in a buttered mold and cooked in moist heat rather than dry. The steaming vessel matters more than anything else here.
- The base recipeSteamed Cottage Pudding sends you back to the book's baked Cottage Pudding, a plain butter-and-egg cake batter raised with baking powder. Without that entry in front of you the steamed version cannot be assembled.
- Mold and steaming rigA "buttered mold" is any straight-sided tin or pudding basin filled no more than two-thirds, buttered heavily and covered with a tight lid or with foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top it up with boiling water as it goes down. Letting the pot boil dry is the usual failure.
- Sour milkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, acidic enough to react with soda. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in; a cup of whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, rested ten minutes, also works.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda in the Indian pudding is there for the acid in the sour milk and molasses. Mixing it into the milk first, as directed, is deliberate. Substituting baking powder leaves that acid unneutralised and gives a flatter result.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, sold by butchers and in shredded form in some markets. Frozen and grated it distributes evenly. Cold unsalted butter, grated, is the usual replacement, though the texture is softer and less springy.
- Corn meal"Corn meal" in this book means plain yellow or white meal, not a self-rising cornbread mix. Stone-ground medium meal gives the slightly grainy body the long steam is designed to soften.
- Why four hoursCorn meal needs prolonged moist heat to gelatinize fully; cut the time short and the pudding tastes raw and gritty. The cake-based cottage pudding, by contrast, is done at an hour and a half and will dry out if pushed further. Test either with a skewer to the center.
- Yield and servingUnmold while hot, cut in wedges, and serve warm with the named sauce: lemon or strawberry for the cottage pudding, molasses for the Indian pudding. Both puddings reheat well by re-steaming.
Cottage pudding and Indian pudding stand at opposite ends of the American dessert tradition, and it is telling that a single cookbook should still carry both. Indian pudding takes its name from "Indian meal," the colonial term for maize meal as distinguished from English wheat flour, and its combination of corn meal, molasses and suet reflects a New England household using what the region actually produced. Cottage pudding is the later, thriftier idea: a plain cake batter given a sauce so it counts as a dessert. Both were steamed in a covered mold, which produced a moist pudding that could sit on the back of the stove until dinner.