Home › Hot Puddings › Bangor Pudding
Bangor Pudding
1⅓ cups cracker crumbs Boiling water 2 cups milk ½ cup molasses 1 egg 1 cup raisins Moisten cracker crumbs with boiling water, and let stand until cool. Add milk, molasses, egg slightly beaten, and raisins seeded and cut in pieces. Turn into a buttered pudding mould, and steam eight hours. Let stand in mould to cool. Serve cold with Cream Sauce II.
A plain steamed cracker pudding of the sort New England households made when crackers were cheaper than flour. The transcription carries at least one obvious typographical error, so read the quantities with care before you begin.
- The quantitiesThe printed page was checked: the pudding takes 1⅓ cups cracker crumbs and ½ cup molasses, as our text now gives. Both figures sit sensibly against 2 cups milk, one egg, and a cup of raisins.
- What kind of crackerThe crumbs meant here are common crackers or soda crackers — dry, unsweetened, faintly salty. Unsalted saltines pounded fine are the closest supermarket equivalent. Graham crackers or any sweetened cracker will throw the balance off entirely.
- Moistening, and why it waitsThe boiling water is added only to soften the crumbs; enough to make a stiff paste, no more. Letting it cool before the egg goes in is the point of that step, since hot crumbs would begin to set the egg.
- Steaming set-upA buttered mould or pudding basin of a quart and a half or more, covered with a lid or a doubled sheet of foil tied down, set on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops; letting the pot run dry is the main way this pudding fails.
- Eight hours is deliberateNothing in the mixture needs anything like that long merely to cook through. The long steaming darkens the molasses, breaks the cracker down completely and is what gives the dense, sliceable texture the recipe is after; a much shorter steaming can be expected to leave the pudding paler and softer.
- Serve cold, despite the sectionServe cold -- the instruction is explicit: cool it in the mould, which lets it firm up enough to unmould cleanly and slice. Cream Sauce II is one of the book's dessert cream sauces; any lightly sweetened pouring cream or thin vanilla custard stands in for it.
- YieldSix to eight in modest slices. It keeps several days covered and refrigerated, and slices reheat well in a steamer if you would rather have it warm.
Steamed puddings built on cracker crumbs, molasses and raisins were standard cold-weather economy in nineteenth-century New England, where the shipping trade kept molasses cheap and hard crackers were a staple laid in by the barrel. The name points to Bangor, Maine, then a lumber town of considerable wealth and a place whose kitchens turned out plain, long-cooked, sustaining food; a number of period cookbooks attach town and city names to puddings of this type without any documented connection to the place, so the attribution is best read as traditional rather than historical. Fannie Farmer's inclusion of it in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is characteristic: her hot pudding chapter is full of dishes that cost almost nothing and required a stove kept going all day anyway.