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Raisin Puff
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 cup sweet milk 2 cups flour 1 cup seeded raisins 2 teaspoons baking powder Sift Cream the butter and sugar; add the well-beaten eggs. together the flour and baking powder; add alternately with the milk. Then add the raisins, finely chopped. Put into small greased cups and steam one half hour. Serve with lemon or vanilla sauce.
A plain steamed batter pudding of the sort that lived in every early twentieth-century American cookbook. The method is straightforward; the details that matter are the vessels and the steam.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes of the period call for. Do not substitute buttermilk here, since the leavening is baking powder rather than soda.
- The garbled first lines"Sift" has been displaced in the original setting, printed just before "Cream the butter and sugar" instead of with "together the flour and baking powder." Read it as: cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs, then sift flour with baking powder and add alternately with the milk.
- Small greased cupsCustard cups, ramekins or dariole moulds of about 6 ounces. Butter them well and fill only two-thirds full, or the puff will climb over the rim as it rises. The batter is bulky, so the number of cups will depend on their size; have more ready than you expect to need.
- Cover each cupSteam condensing off the lid will pit the tops and make them soggy. Cover each cup with a square of buttered foil or parchment, crimped down, before it goes into the steamer.
- Setting up the steamerA rack in a deep pot with an inch or so of simmering water, lid on, works as well as a purpose-made steamer. Keep the water at a steady simmer rather than a hard boil and top it up with boiling water if it runs low.
- Half an hour is rightUnusually for a period pudding, the timing holds. Test at 30 minutes: the puff should be risen, dry to the touch and springy, and a skewer should come out clean. Small cups cook fast, so do not push much beyond 35 minutes or they will toughen.
- Chopping the raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that the fruit is seedless by variety; modern dark or golden raisins need no attention. Chopping them fine, as directed, keeps them suspended instead of sinking; tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps further.
- The sauceLemon or vanilla sauce here means a sweet pudding sauce, usually thickened with cornstarch or flour, thin enough to pour, served warm. The puffs are barely sweet on their own and want it.
Steamed cup puddings like this one are the American descendants of English boiled and steamed puddings, scaled down from the single large cloth-tied pudding to individual moulds that cooked in half an hour on top of the stove. In a period when many kitchens ran on wood or coal and heating a large oven was a deliberate act, a pudding that steamed over a pot alongside the rest of dinner was a genuine economy. The book's loose-leaf format let a cook add and rearrange pages, and it belongs to the wave of early twentieth-century instructional cookbooks; the ingredients here are cheap, standardized and measured in cups rather than by weight or by handful. Raisins were a workhorse dessert fruit of the era: shelf-stable, available year-round, and cheap enough after the growth of California raisin drying to appear in puddings, cakes and pies without occasion.