Snow Balls
1 cup sugar 2¼ cups flour 1/2 cup milk 4 egg whites 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Cream butter and sugar, add milk, and flour and baking powder, sifted together. Then egg whites, beaten until stiff. Steam in buttered cups 35 minutes. Serve with fruit preserves.
A steamed white pudding from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet, printed in the compressed style those books used. Two ingredients named in the method never made it into the list, so read the whole thing before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe method creams butter and sugar, but neither appears in the ingredient list — a typesetting casualty. For 2¼ cups flour and 4 whites, ½ cup butter and 1 to 1¼ cups sugar is the proportion these steamed white puddings normally run to, but the original is genuinely silent and any figure is a reconstruction.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder of the phosphate-and-alum type; modern double-acting powder substitutes one for one. Two level teaspoons for 2¼ cups flour is on the light side because the beaten whites carry much of the lift.
- Buttered cupsThese are individual moulds — teacups, custard cups, or dariole moulds of about 6 oz. Butter them well and fill no more than two-thirds, since the batter climbs as it steams.
- Steaming setupSet the cups on a rack in a deep pan with an inch or two of simmering water, cover tightly, and keep the water at a bare simmer so it does not boil into the cups. Top up with boiling water if it runs low over 35 minutes.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in last. Fold them into a batter that is already fully mixed, and stop while a few streaks remain rather than beating them flat.
- DonenessThirty-five minutes suits cups of about 6 oz; larger moulds will need appreciably longer. A skewer should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides. Unmould after five minutes' rest.
- YieldAbout eight to ten small puddings. Serve warm, turned out, with warmed preserves spooned over — raspberry or apricot both suit the plain white crumb.
Reliable Recipes was one of the free booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and like all such books its purpose was to get a branded tin into the kitchen; the brand name is written into the ingredient line rather than left as a generic measure. The dish itself is older than the booklet. Steamed puddings cooked in small buttered cups were common nineteenth-century household work, often done on the stovetop rather than in the oven, and a white version made with egg whites alone appears to have been called a snow ball for its pale, domed appearance once turned out. The fruit preserves served over it are doing the work of a sauce.