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Spice Pudding
1 cup butter. 3 cups flour. 1 cup buttermilk. 2 eggs beaten together. 1 level teaspoon cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup molasses (New Orleans). 1 teaspoon soda.
Serve with sherry sauce.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — Mrs. Wilson's books often assume the cook already knows how a spice pudding goes together. The quantities are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- The missing methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs and molasses, then add the sifted flour and spices alternately with the buttermilk, into which the soda has been stirred. It is a heavy batter, closer to gingerbread than to a light cake.
- Baked or steamedEither works with this batter. Baked in a greased tube or loaf pan at 350F it takes about 45-55 minutes; steamed in a covered greased mould set in simmering water it needs about 2 hours. The book gives no direction, so choose by the sauce — a steamed pudding takes sherry sauce better.
- Soda and buttermilkThe single teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it is doing double duty: neutralising both the buttermilk and the acid in the molasses. Dissolve it in the buttermilk and get the batter into the pan promptly rather than letting it stand.
- New Orleans molassesThe book gives no reason for the specification; the alternatives on a 1920 shelf included sulphured refinery syrups. Use a dark unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is too bitter and will fight the spices.
- Butter quantityA full cup (8 oz) of butter against 3 cups of flour is very rich by modern pudding standards, and the result is dense and moist. It will not rise much — do not read the flat top as a failure.
- Sherry sauceThe customary version is a hard sauce or a thin cooked sauce: butter and powdered sugar creamed with sherry, or a cornstarch-thickened sugar syrup finished off the heat with sherry so the alcohol is not driven off.
- YieldEnough for 8 to 10 servings, which is consistent with the family scale of the rest of the book.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book (1920) came out of Mary A. Wilson's work as a household columnist for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and as a domestic-science writer during and just after the First World War, when substitution and thrift were still fresh habits. A spice pudding of this kind — molasses, soda, buttermilk, cinnamon and nutmeg — belongs to the long American line of steamed and baked molasses puddings that descend from British boiled puddings but use the cheaper sweetener that was widely to hand. Molasses remained a common household sweetener in much of the country into the early twentieth century, though granulated sugar had largely displaced it by 1920; the specification of "New Orleans" appears to mark a quality distinction that mattered then and has largely vanished, being generally understood to mean an open-kettle cane molasses from the Louisiana sugar districts rather than a byproduct syrup from a refinery. Sherry sauce over a hot pudding was a standard genteel finish, and it is worth noting that the book was published in the first year of national Prohibition.