Home › Hot Desserts › St. James Pudding
St. James Pudding
1 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup New Orleans molasses 1 cup milk 3 3/4 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg 3/4 cup chopped dates 1 1/4 cups chopped figs 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder Melt the butter, add the molasses, sugar, spices, salt, milk. Sift the soda and baking powder with the flour. Dredge the fruit with a little of the flour. Stir the flour into the liquids, and lastly add the fruit. Steam three hours. Serve with whipped cream.
A steamed pudding of the plain, sturdy sort — no suet, no eggs, the fruit doing most of the work. The method is simple; the details of vessel and water level are what decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: a covered mold and steady waterFill a buttered 2-quart mold or pudding basin no more than two-thirds full and cover it tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, so condensation cannot drip in and waterlog the top. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top it up with boiling water as it falls. Letting the pot run dry is the usual way this pudding is ruined.
- New Orleans molassesThis means light or medium unsulphured cane molasses, the ordinary table grade of the period. Do not substitute blackstrap, which is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the dates and figs.
- Soda"Soda" is baking soda (bicarbonate). It is here to react with the acid in the molasses; the baking powder handles the rest of the lift.
- The flour quantity3 3/4 cups against only one cup of milk gives a very stiff batter, closer to a dough — normal for a steamed fruit pudding, which should hold a spoon upright rather than pour. If it will not come together at all, a spoonful or two more milk is within the spirit of the recipe; flour of this period was often softer and may absorb less than modern all-purpose.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the chopped dates and figs in a little of the measured flour keeps them from clumping and sinking. Use flour taken from the 3 3/4 cups, not extra.
- Timing and donenessThree hours is right for a full 2-quart mold; smaller molds or individual cups need proportionally less, from about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. It is done when a skewer into the center comes out clean and the pudding has pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand 10 minutes before turning out.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10. Whipped cream is the book's suggestion; a hard sauce or a thin vanilla pouring sauce suits it equally, and leftovers reheat well by steaming slices for a few minutes.
- Grated nutmegGrate it from a whole nutmeg if you can. Half a teaspoon of pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a cupboard for a year contributes almost nothing to a pudding this dark.
Steamed puddings like this one are descendants of the British boiled pudding, which reached American kitchens tied in a floured cloth and later moved into tin molds with clamped lids. This version contains no suet: chopped beef kidney fat was the traditional binder and shortening for such puddings, and melted butter stands in for it here. The name "St. James Pudding" turns up in American household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually attached to a dark, spiced, date-or-fig pudding of roughly this composition; the attribution appears to be conventional rather than documented, and no particular St. James has been convincingly connected to it. Dates and figs were both imported and shelf-stable, and a three-hour steam on the stovetop would have cost less fuel than three hours of oven heat.