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Graham Pudding
1/4 cup butter ½ cup molasses 1/2 cup milk 1 egg. . 1½ cups Graham flour ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup raisins, seeded and cut in pieces Melt butter, add molasses, milk, egg well beaten, dry ingredients mixed and sifted, and raisins; turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam two and one-half hours. Serve with Wine Sauce. Dates or figs cut in small pieces may be used in place of raisins.
St. James Pudding 3 tablespoons butter ½ cup molasses ½ cup milk 1⅞ cups flour ½ teaspoon soda
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the sort that anchored New England winter suppers. Everything hinges on steady, gentle steam rather than heat.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, including the bran and germ. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current equivalent; it absorbs more liquid than white flour, so the batter should be thick but pourable.
- Wet ingredientsThe proportions of butter, molasses, milk and egg are not stated in this text; the ingredient list as printed here has lost them, and they cannot be recovered from what survives on the page.
- Soda, not baking powderThe soda works against the acidity of the molasses, which is why no baking powder appears. Sift it thoroughly with the flour and salt; unmixed soda leaves bitter yellow streaks in a dark pudding.
- The mouldA 1½-quart pudding mould, coffee tin or heatproof bowl, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds, so the pudding has room to rise. Cover tightly with the lid or with buttered foil tied down, or condensed steam will waterlog the top.
- Setting up the steamerStand the mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it falls; if the pot boils dry the pudding scorches.
- Two and a half hours is realThe long time is not a mistake. Whole-wheat batter steamed at 212F cooks slowly; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides. Let it stand five minutes before unmoulding.
- Wine sauceThe book's wine sauce is a creamed butter-and-sugar sauce with wine beaten in; the type of wine is not specified here. A hard sauce, or plain cream, serves the same purpose if you would rather not use wine.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Steamed puddings reheat well: return slices to the covered mould and steam 20 minutes, or microwave briefly.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unsifted whole-wheat flour was more wholesome than the fine white flour then coming into fashion. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the end of the century, "Graham" had shed most of its reforming zeal and simply meant coarse whole wheat, sold in every grocery and used in bread, gems, muffins and puddings like this one. Steamed molasses puddings suited a kitchen with a coal range: the pot could sit at the back of the stove for hours without attention, and molasses was cheaper than sugar for most of the nineteenth century in New England, where it arrived by the barrel from the West Indies.