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Cherry Pudding
Follow the recipe for Fig Pudding, adding one cup of fresh cherries. If the cherries are very juicy add about two tablespoons more of flour. Cooked cherries may be used: drain them and save the juice for sauce.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it only makes sense alongside the book's Fig Pudding, a steamed batter pudding cooked in a fireless cooker. A few things need translating before it will work on a modern stove.
- Start with the base recipeYou need the Fig Pudding formula from the same section for quantities of flour, fat, sugar, liquid and leavening. This page supplies only the fruit substitution and the flour correction.
- What a fireless cooker wasIf the Fig Pudding belongs to a fireless-cookery section of the book: such a cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest holding soapstone or iron discs heated on the range, which cooked food by stored heat over several hours. No timing appears on this page because it is a cross-reference to the base recipe.
- Cooking it without oneCooking it -- Treat it as any steamed pudding: a greased and covered mold set on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up the sides, simmering, 2 to 2 1/2 hours for a quart mold. A slow cooker with an inch of water in the bottom, on low, will also work.
- Pit the cherriesThe book assumes you know this. Pit them, and cut large sweet cherries in half.
- The extra flourThe two tablespoons are structural, not a garnish. Fresh cherries release enough juice to loosen the batter into pudding soup, and a steamed pudding has no dry oven heat to compensate. Toss the fruit in the flour rather than stirring it into the batter and the cherries will also sink less.
- Canned or cooked cherriesDrain them very well and pat them dry; syrup-packed fruit will both thin the batter and sweeten it past what the base recipe expects. Reduce the reserved juice by about a third with a spoonful of sugar and a squeeze of lemon for the sauce.
- Cherry varietyHome-grown cherries of this period were often sour types, sharper than a supermarket Bing. With sweet cherries, cut the sugar in the base recipe slightly or add lemon zest to keep the pudding from tasting flat.
- YieldA quart mold of steamed pudding serves six to eight, warm, with the cherry sauce or a hard sauce.
Fireless cookery had a brief but genuine vogue in American households in the years around the First World War, when insulated cookers were sold as fuel-savers and, as importantly, as a way to keep a coal or wood range out of the kitchen through the summer. The principle was the same one behind the hay box and, later, the thermal cooker: heat stored in soapstone or in the food itself, held by insulation, doing the work of a low fire. Steamed and boiled puddings suited it perfectly, since they want long, gentle, moist heat and cannot scorch.