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Steamed Fruit Pudding
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups fruit Sift the flour and baking powder together; stir in the beaten egg and the milk gradually. Mix until smooth; add the fruit, washed, the milk gradually. Mix until smooth; add the fruit, washed, drained and well dredged with flour; stir carefully and empty into a greased tin can or pudding mold. Cover; stand in a pot of boiling water and boil continuously for three hours. Serve with sugar and cream or with hard sauce. 1 quart peaches 1 cup water 1½ cups sugar 1/3 cup milk
A plain steamed batter pudding with fruit folded through — essentially a boiled cobbler. The typography of the original page has garbled a little: one clause repeats itself, and the final line ("1 quart peaches, 1 cup water, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/3 cup milk") belongs to a separate recipe that ran alongside it and is not part of this batter.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingThree hours of unbroken steam is what sets this batter; if the pot drops off the boil the pudding can sink and turn gluey in the middle. Keep a kettle of boiling water beside the pot and top up as the level falls, never with cold water. Fill the mold two-thirds full: four teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of flour is a generous leavening and this batter climbs, so grease the mold well, fill it no more than two-thirds, and tie or clamp the lid so the cover cannot lift.
- "Greased tin can"The recipe's own mold is a tin can; an empty coffee or baking-powder tin would have served the purpose. A 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin, ring mold or heatproof bowl covered with foil and tied does the same job; modern lined food cans are not made for boiling.
- Water level in the potThe mold should sit on a rack or folded cloth with boiling water coming halfway to two-thirds up its side, not over the top. Cover the pot to keep the steam in.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the washed, well-drained fruit in flour keeps it suspended rather than settling in a wet layer at the bottom. Berries, sliced apples, stoned cherries and diced peaches all work; very juicy fruit should be drained hard first.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, roughly 1/2 cup butter to 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, flavored with vanilla, brandy or lemon and chilled firm. It melts over the hot pudding, which is the point.
- Yield and donenessServes six to eight. Test with a skewer through the center — it should come out clean of raw batter; unmold after five minutes' rest so the pudding firms enough to hold its shape.
- Shortening the timeThree hours suits a dense mold in a stockpot, and three hours is what the recipe specifies. A wider steamer with strong heat may get there sooner; go by the skewer rather than the clock.
Loose-leaf cook books like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as ring binders so a household could add clippings and its own cards, which is why the pages often run recipes shoulder to shoulder. The pudding itself belongs to the long Anglo-American line of boiled and steamed puddings, cooked in a cloth or a tin over water because a coal range is often said to have given more reliable heat on the top than inside the oven, and because steam let a cook feed a table from one pot. By the time this book appeared, chemical baking powder had come to stand in for the older suet-and-egg structure in recipes of this kind, though suet puddings persisted well past this date, which is why the batter reads more like a quick bread than like a Victorian plum pudding; the fruit is whatever the season gave, and hard sauce, a butter-and-sugar paste eaten cold against the hot pudding, was a common finish in American kitchens.