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Creole New Year Pudding
1/2 lb. figs 1/4 lb. grated bread crumbs 3/4 cup milk 1/4 cup sugar 3/8 cup butter 2 eggs Chop figs fine, beat sugar and egg yolks to thick lemon-colored cream. Add melted butter and crumbs which have previously been wet and then squeezed dry. Add milk and stiffly beaten egg whites. Butter a mold, sprinkle it with flour, pour in the pudding, steam 3 hours. Serve with hard sauce or mock-brandy sauce.
A plain steamed bread pudding of the English figgy-pudding family, lightened with beaten whites. Nothing here is difficult, but the steaming setup and the crumb treatment decide whether it turns out tender or leaden.
- When to add the figsThe figs are chopped at the start but no later step names them. Fold them in with the crumbs, before the milk and whites, so they are evenly distributed and the mixture is not overworked afterward.
- 3/8 cup butterSix tablespoons, or 3 oz. Melt it and let it cool slightly so it does not cook the yolks when it goes in.
- Soaking the crumbs"Previously been wet" means soaked in water or milk and wrung out by hand. Use dry, stale crumbs, not fresh soft ones, or the squeezed mass will be paste. A quarter pound of crumbs may measure anywhere from about 1 to 2 cups, depending on how fine and dry they are.
- The moldA 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or a straight-sided metal mold with a lid. Fill it no more than two-thirds; the whites give it lift. Butter and flour thoroughly, then cover tightly with a lid or with buttered foil tied down, so condensation cannot drip in.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water hourly and top up with boiling water only. Three hours is right for this size; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides.
- UnmoldingLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat before turning out, or the crumb structure tears.
- Mock-brandy sauceThe recipe gives no formula for either sauce. Mock-brandy sauces of the period were generally built on sugar, butter and boiling water, flavored with brandy extract or flavoring in place of spirits. Hard sauce is creamed butter and confectioners' sugar, worked smooth and chilled; it wants a warm pudding under it.
- YieldSix to eight servings. It reheats well by steaming for 30 to 40 minutes.
Steamed fig puddings reached American kitchens largely through the English Christmas pudding tradition, where dried figs, breadcrumbs and suet were boiled in a cloth for hours; this version uses butter rather than suet and calls for no spirits. The "Creole" label in books of this sort may be applied loosely, marking a dish as belonging to the New Orleans holiday table rather than certifying any particular lineage. The mock-brandy sauce lets a household serve the expected accompaniment without the bottle, but substitute sauces flavored with extract appear in American cookbooks well before Prohibition and cannot on their own date the recipe.