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Ginger Pudding
1/3 cup butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 1 egg. 2 1/4 cups flour. 3½ teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons ginger 1 cup milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten; mix and sift dry ingredients; add alternately with milk to first mixture. Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam two hours; serve with Vanilla Sauce.
The ingredient list on this page has come through badly: the opening lines listing butter, sugar, egg and flour are missing, and the numerals that survive are garbled. The method is intact and typical of Farmer's steamed puddings, so the proportions can be reasoned about, but they should not be guessed at silently.
- The quantitiesThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for ¼ teaspoon salt and 3½ teaspoons baking powder, which is what our text now gives. That is a generous amount of baking powder for one cup of milk, but a steamed pudding relies on it for lift.
- The missing ingredientsA pudding that begins "cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten" requires butter, sugar, at least one egg and flour, none of which appear on the page. Any amounts you supply are your own; steamed puddings of this general type tend to run to something like ¼–⅓ cup butter, ½ cup sugar, 1 egg and about 2 cups flour, but the figures belonging to this recipe are lost.
- GingerTwo teaspoons means ground dried ginger, not fresh root. Ground ginger loses pungency fast on the shelf, and two teaspoons of an old jar will taste of dust rather than heat.
- The mouldA period pudding mould is a lidded tin cylinder. A 1½-quart pudding basin, metal bowl or coffee can works; butter it well and fill it no more than two-thirds, since the batter climbs as it steams.
- Covering matters more than the vessel"Cover" means seal against condensation. Buttered parchment or foil tied down with string keeps drips off the surface; without it the top goes wet and slack no matter how long it steams.
- Steaming setupStand the mould on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full two hours. Top up with boiling water as it falls so the pot never runs dry.
- DonenessTwo hours is right for this size, but test rather than trust the clock: a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Rest five minutes before unmoulding.
- Vanilla Sauce and yieldVanilla Sauce is a sweet pudding sauce rather than a set custard, poured hot over each portion; consult the book's own recipe for its exact composition. No yield is given here; a pudding of this size would serve roughly six.
Steamed puddings occupy a long stretch of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and it is easy enough to suppose they suited the kitchen she was writing for, where a covered mould in simmering water would have produced a reliable hot dessert with almost no attention. The form is English in descent, a descendant of the pudding-cloth boiled puddings of the eighteenth century, softened by the arrival of chemical leavening, which is why baking powder appears here in a dish whose ancestors relied on suet and long boiling alone. A plain ginger pudding with a sweet white sauce belongs to the everyday end of the dessert repertoire rather than the occasion end.