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Fruit Pudding
1 cup milk salt Slade's spices 2 tsp. Royal bak. pow. 1 qt. flour
— Mrs. John Legg
This is a community-cookbook shorthand entry: a list of what to buy, written for a cook who already knew what a fruit pudding was. Before you attempt it, understand that the list is incomplete and the proportions as printed will not work on their own.
- The missing ingredientsThere is no fruit, no sugar, no fat and no egg here, though the title promises fruit and the presence of milk, flour and baking powder implies a sweetened steamed or baked batter. Anyone reconstructing this needs a full modern steamed fruit pudding recipe for the proportions; treat this page as a shopping note rather than a method.
- A quart of flourDry measure by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz of all-purpose flour. Against a single cup of milk that gives a stiff dough, not a pudding batter, which is further evidence that eggs, fat and juicy fruit were assumed.
- Leavening is shortTwo teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour works out at half a teaspoon per cup, a third to a half of what modern practice uses (1 to 1 1/2 tsp per cup). Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, so it began working the moment liquid hit it and the pudding went straight into the pot or oven.
- Slade's spicesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston sold packaged ground spices and extracts; the entry names the brand but not which spice or how much. Cinnamon with smaller amounts of nutmeg, clove and allspice would suit a fruit pudding, but any quantity is a modern guess.
- Named brands"Royal bak. pow." is an ordinary double-acting baking powder substitution today, though the original was single-acting.
- How it was cookedPuddings of this type were steamed in a covered greased mould set in simmering water, typically 1 1/2 to 2 hours, or baked. Nothing on the page says which, or at what temperature.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes a large pudding, probably enough for eight to ten servings, which suits the fundraising context of the book.
The Philathea cook books were produced by Philathea classes, the young women's wing of the Baraca-Philathea Bible class movement that spread through American and Canadian Protestant churches in the early twentieth century; the recipes were solicited from members and printed with their names attached, which is why Mrs. John Legg's contribution reads like a note passed between two people who had both made the dish. Fruit pudding in this period usually meant a steamed or baked batter studded with raisins, currants, dried apples or whatever was preserved, a descendant of the boiled suet puddings of British cookery adapted to a stove and a baking-powder tin. The compression is typical of fundraising cookbooks: contributors left the method to common knowledge, which is precisely the knowledge that has since been lost.