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Imperial Steamed Pudding
14 ounces of butter. 12 ounces of sugar. 11 eggs. 1 pound of flour. Lemon and nutmeg extracts. 3/4 pound of almonds. 1/2 pound of citron. 1/2 pound of raisins.
Mix the former ingredients as if for pound cake. Sca'd, peel and chop the almonds, cut the citron in shreds and take the seeds out of the raisins. Before adding the fruit to the cake mixture dust it well with 2 ounces more flour.
Steam in ornamental moulds about 2 1/2 hours. Lemon, brandy, wine, meringue or sabayon sauce.
A pound-cake batter loaded with fruit and nuts and cooked by steam rather than dry heat, which keeps it moist and gives it the dense, close crumb of a Christmas pudding. The proportions are given by weight, which is how it should still be made.
- Weights in cups14 oz butter is 3 1/2 sticks; 12 oz granulated sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; 1 pound flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups depending on how it is scooped, plus the 2 oz (about 1/2 cup) for dusting the fruit. Weigh if you can, since the batter is stiff enough that a heavy cup of flour will show.
- Eleven eggsEggs in this period were not graded and varied in size, often running smaller than today's large. Eleven modern large eggs is roughly 20 oz shelled, close enough; if your eggs are extra-large use nine or ten so the batter does not slacken.
- "Mix as if for pound cake"Cream the butter and sugar until pale, beat the eggs in a few at a time, then fold in the flour. The eggs must go in gradually and at room temperature or the batter breaks and the pudding turns heavy.
- "Sca'd" the almondsEvidently 'scald', a dropped letter in the printed text: pour boiling water over the almonds, let them stand a minute, and the skins slip off. Three quarters of a pound blanched and chopped is a lot of almond.
- Citron and raisinsCandied citron peel is still sold at Christmas and in Italian groceries; candied lemon peel substitutes directly. "Take the seeds out of the raisins" suggests a date before seedless raisins were the norm, so ordinary raisins today need no work.
- Dusting the fruitThe 2 oz of extra flour on the fruit and nuts keeps them suspended instead of sinking to the bottom of the mould, which in a steamed pudding becomes the top when you turn it out. Do not skip it.
- Moulds and steamingButter the moulds heavily, fill them no more than two thirds, and cover each tightly with buttered parchment and foil or a tied cloth so condensation cannot get in. Set them on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up, and top up with boiling water as it drops.
- Time and donenessTwo and a half hours at a steady bare simmer, not a hard boil. A skewer should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides; let it rest ten minutes before unmoulding.
- YieldThis is a large batch, close to 6 pounds of batter. Expect two 1 1/2-quart moulds or six to eight individual ones, serving twelve to sixteen with sauce.
Steamed puddings were a practical dessert of the nineteenth-century kitchen: a covered pot on the range needed no oven, and the moist heat forgave a cook who could not read a thermometer. What separates this one from an English plum pudding is that it starts from a pound-cake batter of creamed butter, sugar, eggs and flour rather than the older base of suet and breadcrumbs, and the almonds do much of the work usually given to dried fruit. Grand names such as "Imperial" were common in period pastry nomenclature, though what it was meant to signify here is not recorded. The ornamental moulds and the list of four or five finishing sauces suggest a professional rather than a plain domestic setting.