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Red Wine Sauce
1/2 pound of granulated sugar. 1/2 pound of fresh butter. 1/2 pound of white of eggs (9 whites). 1/2 cupful of milk 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. 1 pound of flour. 1/2 cup of brandy. 1 pound of sultana raisins. Cream the butter and sugar together as for pound cake. Add the whites same way--not previously beaten. Then mix in the baking powder, after that the flour, milk, brandy, raisins. Steam in moulds from 1 1/2 to 2 hours. The wine sauce served with this pudding should have a lemon cut up in it. Raspberry vinegar is an excellent sauce for puddings of the above description.
The heading promises a sauce; the text is actually a steamed white fruit pudding, with the sauce mentioned only in the last two lines. Weigh rather than measure — the whole formula is built on half-pounds.
- The title is a misfilingEverything before the last two sentences is a steamed pudding. The recipe asks only for a "wine sauce" with a lemon cut up in it; the sauce itself is not given here, and nothing in the text specifies red wine or how it was made.
- Egg whites by weightHalf a pound of whites is a scant cup. At 9 whites to the half-pound the eggs were smaller than modern ones; with modern large eggs it takes about 7 whites to reach the weight. Weigh to 225 g if you can.
- Do not beat the whitesThis is the hinge. The whites go into the creamed butter and sugar unbeaten, a little at a time, exactly as you would add whole eggs to a pound cake. Beaten whites folded in would collapse under a pound of flour and a pound of raisins.
- Flour and leaveningA pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups; use plain flour, since the recipe supplies its own teaspoon of baking powder. One teaspoon to a pound of flour is very little, so most of the lift has to come from the creamed butter.
- SultanasSultanas are golden raisins, seedless and paler than Muscatel raisins. Toss them in a spoonful of the weighed flour before mixing so they do not sink.
- Steaming the mouldsButter the moulds well and fill no more than two-thirds. Cover each with buttered paper or foil tied down, set on a rack in a pot with water reaching halfway up, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water as needed.
- Timing and donenessThe 1 1/2 to 2 hours assumes individual or quart-sized moulds. One large pudding in a 2-quart basin will want closer to 3 hours; test with a skewer, which should come out clean and hot.
- YieldThe batter weighs close to 4 pounds, near 2 quarts in volume; filled two-thirds full that is three 1-quart moulds, serving 12 to 16. Steamed puddings reheat well by re-steaming for 20 to 30 minutes.
- Raspberry vinegarThe alternative sauce is the old sweetened fruit shrub — raspberries steeped in vinegar, strained and boiled with sugar — served as a thin syrup, not the salad vinegar sold under that name today.
Steamed puddings of this kind sat at the heart of American and British dessert cookery well into the twentieth century, and a pudding could be set going hours ahead of dinner. This one is a "white" pudding: only egg whites, pale sultanas rather than currants or dark Muscatels, and brandy instead of molasses, which keeps the crumb near-blond and marks it out from the Christmas plum pudding it otherwise resembles. The instruction to cream the whites in unbeaten, as for pound cake, places it in the pound-cake family — equal half-pounds of butter, sugar and egg — stretched with a full pound of flour and fruit. It is served with a wine sauce, with raspberry vinegar offered as an alternative.