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Harvard Pudding
1/3 cup butter ½ cup sugar 2½ cups flour 3½ teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup milk Mix and sift dry ingredients and work in butter with tips of fingers; beat egg, add milk, and combine mixtures; turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam two hours; serve with warm Apple Sauce and Hard Sauce.
Apple Sauce. Pick over and wash dried apples, soak over night in cold water to cover; cook until soft; sweeten, and flavor with lemon juice.
A plain steamed suet-less pudding of the kind that anchored the back of every American cookbook around 1900 — essentially a rich biscuit dough cooked in a covered mould over water. The two sauces do most of the work.
- Mould and fill levelA quart-and-a-half to two-quart pudding mould, or a straight-sided metal bowl, buttered well. Fill it no more than two-thirds; the batter rises considerably and needs headroom under the lid.
- Setting up the steamSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer with the pot lid on. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates — letting the pot run dry is the usual way this pudding is ruined.
- Two hours is realSteamed puddings are slow by design and forgiving of a little extra time, but not of less. Test with a skewer to the centre; it should come out clean and the pudding should be springy, not wet.
- The baking powderThree and a half teaspoons to 2½ cups of flour is a heavy hand by current standards, probably reflecting the single-acting powders common in the period. With modern double-acting powder, 2½ to 3 teaspoons should give comparable lift.
- Working in the butterRub the butter into the sifted dry ingredients until the mixture looks like coarse meal, then add the egg and milk and stir only until combined. Overmixing at this stage gives a tough, rubbery pudding.
- Dried applesSold today as dried apple rings or slices, usually sulphured. Overnight soaking is still the right approach — the recipe gives no quantity, only cold water to cover — and they cook down in roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Unsulphured fruit will darken the sauce, which is harmless.
- Hard sauce, unstatedThe book assumes you know it: roughly 1/3 cup butter creamed with 1 cup sifted confectioners' sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla or a spoonful of brandy, chilled firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldServes six to eight. Leftovers reheat well by re-steaming for 20 minutes; the microwave works but dries the edges.
Steamed puddings survived into American cookery long after the open hearth disappeared, partly because they cost a cook nothing but fuel and attention — no oven, no careful browning, just a covered pot on the back of the range. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carried dozens of them, distinguished mostly by what went in and what was poured over. The name here almost certainly nods to the university across the Charles rather than to any documented connection with it; nineteenth-century cookbooks attached local place names to plain puddings freely. The dried apples are the period detail worth noticing: in a New England winter, before reliable cold storage and long-distance shipping, dried fruit soaked overnight was how you got apple sauce in February.