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Steamed Cranberry Pudding
1 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt About 3 cups ground entire wheat crumbs (bread) 1 cup cranberries 3 tablespoons melted butter 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cloves A dash of pepper Mix the milk with the salt and sugar, butter and spices, and stir in the cranberries with enough crumbs to make a drop batter. Steam for one hour. Serve hot with cranberry pudding sauce.
A crumb pudding rather than a flour one, which makes the crumb quantity the only real variable. Everything else is straightforward.
- Judge the batter, not the cup measureThree cups is approximate because bread crumbs vary enormously in dryness and coarseness. Add them gradually until the mixture drops heavily from a spoon rather than pours; stale, dry crumbs will absorb more milk than fresh ones.
- "Ground entire wheat crumbs"Entire wheat means whole wheat. Grate or process dry whole-wheat bread; commercial fine dry breadcrumbs work but are usually white and give a paler, blander pudding.
- CranberriesFresh or frozen whole berries, halved if large so they distribute. Do not use sweetened dried cranberries or canned sauce, which would throw the sugar balance and the moisture.
- Sugar is low by modern tasteHalf a cup against a cup of sour berries makes a distinctly tart pudding, which is why the sauce is not optional. Increase to three-quarters of a cup if you are serving it plain.
- The dash of pepperNot a misprint; pepper turns up alongside cinnamon and cloves in some sweet puddings of the period, and it sharpens the spice. An eighth of a teaspoon is plenty.
- Steaming setupButter a pudding basin or covered mold large enough to leave headroom (the batter runs to something over a quart, so allow a mold of about a quart and a half to two quarts), fill no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down, and stand it on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as needed.
- DonenessThe stated hour suits a mold of roughly this size; a deeper vessel will need longer, a shallower one rather less. A skewer into the center should come out clean apart from berry juice. Let it stand five minutes before unmolding.
- YieldServes six modestly. It reheats well by steaming for fifteen to twenty minutes.
Steamed puddings built on breadcrumbs rather than flour are often described as thrift dishes as much as desserts, using up the ends of loaves at a time when a good deal of bread was still baked at home. The whole-wheat crumbs point to the particular concerns of this book: meatless cookery belongs to the wave of vegetarian and reform cooking that ran through American and British household writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which unbolted or "entire" wheat was promoted as more wholesome than white flour. Cranberries suited such kitchens because they keep for weeks in a cold larder and need no sugar to preserve them, and their sharpness carried a pudding that had little fat and no eggs to enrich it. The accompanying sauce, referenced here as a separate recipe, followed the usual practice of serving a steamed pudding with something poured over it.