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Small Confections--Snow Balls
4 eggs. 1/2 cup sugar. 1-3 cup butter. 1 cup flour. 1/2 cup cornstarch. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 cup sweet milk.
Cream butter and sugar, add gradually milk, flour and eggs. Put batter in six well buttered cups and steam one-half hour. Turn out, roll in powdered sugar, and serve with tutti frutti sauce.
A small steamed sponge pudding baked in teacups rather than a mold, finished in powdered sugar so it reads as a snowball. The proportions are sound; the printing is where the trouble lies.
- "1-3 cup butter"Almost certainly a typesetter's rendering of 1/3 cup, about 75 g or a little over five tablespoons. Read it as one-third, not one to three.
- The mixing order is garbledAs printed, milk goes in before flour and eggs, which will curdle the creamed butter. Cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted flour, cornstarch and baking powder alternately with the milk. The cornstarch is there to soften the crumb, so do not swap it out for more flour.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. Whole milk is the right choice.
- "Six well buttered cups"Straight-sided custard cups, dariole molds or a large muffin tin. Butter them heavily and fill no more than two-thirds, as the baking powder gives a good lift with nowhere to go.
- Steaming, properlyCover each cup with buttered foil or parchment tied down, and set them on a rack in a covered pot with simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Uncovered cups take on condensation and the tops go sodden. Half an hour is right for cup-sized puddings; test with a skewer.
- Rolling in sugarTurn them out while hot and roll immediately. Powdered sugar clings to a warm, faintly steamy surface and slides off a cooled one.
- Tutti frutti sauceIn this period that means a sweet sauce or syrup carrying chopped candied and preserved fruits, sometimes brandied, not the commercial ice cream flavoring. Any warm fruit sauce with chopped candied peel and cherries serves the purpose.
- YieldSix puddings, one to a person. They are best within an hour of steaming; reheat leftovers briefly in the steamer rather than the oven, which dries them.
Steamed puddings turned out in individual cups and dusted white were a standard nursery and supper-table sweet on both sides of the Atlantic, and "snowballs" was a common name for small round puddings or dumplings finished in sugar or coconut. A steamed pudding needed only a pot on the stove and no oven heat, which may have been a practical advantage in households watching their fuel. The cornstarch alongside the flour is a period marker too: it was cheap and prized for producing a tenderer crumb than flour alone.