Date Pudding
1 cup molasses. 1 cup milk. 1/3 cup butter. 3 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon allspice. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon cloves teaspoon salt teaspoon allspice teaspoon nutmeg 3/4 pound of dates, cut in pieces buttered mold and steara 2½ hours.
Melt butter and add to the molasses and milk. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and spices, and add with dates. Put into a buttered mold and stean! 2½ hours. Serve with wine sauce. (See illustration, page 51.)
The text as printed has lost most of its quantities — the flour, molasses, milk and butter that the method calls for never appear in the ingredient list, and several spice measures have dropped their fractions. Treat what follows as a guide to reading the recipe rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesFlour, molasses, milk and melted butter are all named in the method but absent from the list, so this cannot be followed literally. Four level teaspoons of baking powder implies a fairly large batter, on the order of three to four cups of flour; anything more precise would be invention on our part. Use a comparable steamed date pudding recipe for the proportions.
- The spice measures"Teaspoon salt", "teaspoon allspice" and "teaspoon nutmeg" have almost certainly lost a fraction in printing — a full teaspoon each of allspice and nutmeg would bury the dates. The half teaspoon of cloves that survives intact suggests the others were quarter or half teaspoons.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was marketed as a double-acting powder, and the brand name is here because this book was published to promote it. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes teaspoon for teaspoon.
- Steaming, not bakingThe mold goes into a covered pot on a rack, with boiling water reaching a third to halfway up its side. Butter the mold well and fill it no more than two-thirds, since a baking-powder batter climbs. Cover the mold with a lid or tied foil so condensation does not drip in.
- Two and a half hoursThat is a genuine time for a pudding of this size, not an overstatement. The water must stay at a steady simmer throughout — check every 40 minutes and top up with boiling water, never cold, or the pudding sinks.
- DatesThree-quarters of a pound of pitted dates is roughly two cups chopped. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink and clump at the bottom of the mold.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is butter and sugar creamed together, thinned with a little boiling water and flavored with sherry or Madeira, served warm and pourable. Hard sauce or a plain custard works as well.
- YieldA pudding built on this much baking powder and dates serves eight to ten. It reheats well: steam slices for ten minutes, or wrap and warm the whole pudding through.
Reliable Recipes was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago in the early twentieth century, which is why the leavening is specified by brand and measured in "level teaspoons" — level measurement was itself a selling point in that era, associated with Fannie Farmer's school and with manufacturers who wanted their product used consistently. The dish belongs to the long line of steamed English puddings that American cooks kept making well into the twentieth century, with molasses and warm spices standing in for the older suet-and-currant formulas. Dates arrived through the Middle Eastern trade, with a Californian industry only beginning to establish itself in the 1900s and 1910s, and packed dates were becoming cheap enough to serve as an everyday sweetener and fruit in home baking, showing up in puddings, breads and eventually the date-and-nut loaf, which came into its own rather later, in the 1920s and 1930s. The steamed pudding survived because it needed only a pot and a mold, useful in a kitchen where the oven's temperature was a guess.