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Steamed Cherry Pudding
1 quart of pitted cherries. 8 heaping cups of flour. 5 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 2 cupfuls of water.
Mix the powder in the flour dry, make a hollow in the middle, throw in a little salt, pour in the water and mix up as soft as it can be handled. Work the dough on the table slightly by pressing it flat with the hands and doubling over. Lay a botton crust of it in a tin pudding pan that holds 4 quarts; spread half the pitted cherries on it, lay another crust on them, then the remainder of the cherries and a third sheet of dough on top. Set in a steamer and steam from 30 to 45 minutes and serve while hot and light, with sauce.
All kinds of fruits can be used to make the above kind of steamed pudding, which has no shortening, but plenty of powder, and has the fruit in layers like apple roll.
A layered steamed fruit pudding built from a plain baking-powder dough with no fat in it at all. The proportions as printed need attention before you start.
- The flour-to-water ratio does not workEight heaping cups of flour to two cups of water gives a dry, unworkable mass; a soft handleable dough at that flour weight wants closer to three cups of liquid. Add water gradually until the dough is soft enough to press flat with the hands, as the text asks.
- Leavening is thinFive teaspoons of baking powder across eight cups of flour is well under modern practice, which runs about a teaspoon per cup. If you keep the full flour quantity, raise the powder accordingly, or the puddings will steam dense rather than "hot and light."
- "Tin pudding pan that holds 4 quarts"Any deep 4-quart metal pan or bowl that fits your steamer with the lid down. Grease it, and leave headroom because the dough rises; note that the top layer here is a sheet of dough, not fruit.
- Steaming setupA large stockpot with a rack and an inch or two of simmering water works as well as a purpose-built steamer. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water rather than cold, so the steam never lapses.
- TimingThirty to forty-five minutes suits a shallow pan; a deep 4-quart pudding will likely need longer. Test with a skewer through the centre; it should come out clean of raw dough.
- CherriesThe recipe specifies only "pitted cherries"; sour cherries are the likely intent and will throw a good deal of juice. Frozen sour cherries work; drain them and toss with a spoonful or two of sugar and a little cornstarch, since the recipe sweetens nothing itself.
- The sauce is not optionalThere is no sugar and no shortening in this dough, so the sauce carries the dish. A hard sauce, a thin custard, or a simple cornstarch-thickened fruit sauce all suit it.
- YieldA full 4-quart pudding serves ten to twelve, cut in wedges and lifted out while hot. It does not keep well; the crust goes gummy once cold.
Steamed suet and dough puddings were the everyday sweet of nineteenth-century Anglo-American kitchens, made in a pan or cloth over the same pot that cooked dinner, and they survived into later recipe collections like this one because they needed no oven space. What is notable here is what the recipe leaves out: no suet, no butter, no sugar in the dough, only flour, water, salt and baking powder. That suggests a date after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable, when bakers could get lift without eggs or long fermentation. The author's own comparison to "apple roll" points to the wider family of layered and rolled fruit doughs, and the closing note that "all kinds of fruits can be used" shows the flexibility of such formulas: one dough, whatever fruit was at hand.