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Jiffy Pudding
2 cups berries or cherries 1¼ cups boiling water 1/2 cup sugar 1/3 cup flour Pour the boiling water on the fruit. Cook gently eight or ten minutes. Mix the sugar and flour and add sufficient cold water to make a smooth liquid. Pour mixture slowly into the fruit, and let simmer five minutes, stirring carefully. Serve with cream, sweetened, or pour into molds and serve cold.
A flour-thickened stewed fruit, halfway between a sauce and a cold shape, and about as fast as its name promises. The whole job is in the thickening.
- Slake the flour properlyMix the sugar and flour dry first, then add cold water a spoonful at a time to a pourable, lump-free slurry — roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup water. Adding it to hot fruit without this step gives you lumps that will not cook out.
- Cook the flour outThe five minutes of simmering is a minimum, not a target. Raw flour tastes pasty; keep it at a lazy bubble until the liquid turns from cloudy to glossy, stirring so the starch does not catch on the bottom.
- Fruit choiceTwo cups is about 10 oz of berries or pitted cherries. Frozen fruit works, but thaw and drain it first and count the released juice as part of the liquid, or the pudding will be thin.
- Sugar is a variableHalf a cup suits sour cherries or currants. With ripe blueberries or sweetened frozen fruit, start at 1/3 cup and taste before you commit — the flour is what does the thickening, so a modest reduction should not much affect the set.
- If you mold itA flour-set pudding firms as it cools but stays soft; it will slump rather than stand. Rinse the molds with cold water before filling, chill at least three hours, and expect a spoonable shape, not a sliceable one. Cornstarch at half the quantity gives a cleaner set if you want it to unmold.
- "Cream, sweetened"Pouring cream, lightly sweetened and unwhipped, is the likely reading — poured cold over the pudding, which the first serving option implies is still warm. Heavy cream straight from the carton works as well.
- YieldFour small servings, or three generous ones.
Fruit thickened with flour or cornstarch and eaten warm with cream is a long-standing shortcut in the English-speaking dessert repertoire, and related dishes go by a range of names — flummery, fruit mold, and in the Scandinavian-influenced Midwest the sweet soups and rødgrød-style puddings that arrived with immigrant cooks. The title is the honest one: this is what you made when berries were in the house and dinner was in an hour. Cornstarch was widely available by this period, but flour is what this recipe calls for.