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Vevey Pudding
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup melted butter 1 cup milk 1 cup molasses Sift first five ingredients together twice. Stir in the milk, then the molasses and the melted butter. Turn into a buttered pudding dish. If in one large dish, steam two hours; if in individual dishes, steam one hour and fifteen minutes, tightly covered. Serve with whipped cream or hard sauce.
A plain steamed molasses pudding, eggless and leavened only by soda reacting with the molasses. The method is straightforward; the details that matter are the steaming rig and the batter's looseness.
- Steaming, not bakingThis is a wet-heat pudding: set the covered dish on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the dish, cover the pot and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Cover it tightlyThe instruction to cover tightly is the hinge. Butter a sheet of foil or parchment, lay it over the dish and tie or crimp it down; condensation dripping in will make the top wet and heavy.
- Fill only two-thirdsThe batter is thin and rises noticeably as the soda works. A 1.5-quart mold or basin is about right for the full quantity; individual dishes should be half-cup to three-quarter-cup ramekins.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the cloves. The soda relies on the molasses for acid to work against, so a near-neutral substitute such as golden syrup will not give the same lift.
- Sifting twiceWith no eggs and no beating stage, the double sift is the main thing distributing the soda through the flour. Skip it and you risk pockets of unmixed soda, which taste bitter and darken the crumb around them.
- DonenessAt two hours a skewer into the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Steamed puddings tolerate extra time far better than they tolerate being cut short; another fifteen minutes does no harm.
- Hard sauceRoughly a cup of confectioners' sugar creamed into a stick of soft butter with a spoonful of brandy or vanilla, chilled firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldThe large dish serves six to eight; the quantity makes about eight individual puddings. Leftovers resteam well for ten minutes.
Steamed puddings survived in American cookbooks long after much home baking had moved to the oven, partly because they need no eggs and no precise oven control, and partly because molasses was generally the cheaper sweetener. The name is presumably borrowed from Vevey on Lake Geneva, a resort town well known to American and British travelers of the period; cookbook authors attached Continental place names to homely dishes freely, and no particular Swiss origin should be read into the recipe, which is an ordinary Anglo-American spiced molasses pudding in construction.