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Nutmeg (Teaspoon each teaspoon)
{ 1/2 teaspoon each 1 teaspoon cinnamon Mix and sift dry ingredients. Add molasses and milk to suet; combine mixtures. Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam three hours; serve with Sterling Sauce. Raisins and currants may be added.
Thanksgiving Pudding I 4 cups scalded milk 1¼ cups rolled crackers 1 cup sugar 4 eggs 1/3 cup melted butter 1/2 grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon salt 1½ cups raisins Pour milk over crackers and let stand until cool; add sugar, eggs slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and butter; parboil raisins until soft, by cooking in boiling water to cover; seed, and add to mixture; turn into buttered pudding-dish and bake slowly two and one-half hours, stirring after first half-hour to prevent raisins from settling; serve with Brandy Sauce. 1/3 cup suet
Thanksgiving Pudding I is a baked cracker custard — closer to a bread pudding than to the steamed suet puddings around it. The whole thing turns on baking it slowly enough that the egg custard sets without curdling.
- Bake slowly means 300FBake slowly -- The book gives no oven temperatures; a 'slow' oven is conventionally read today as about 300F, and at two and a half hours that suits a four-egg custard in a deep dish. Set the pudding-dish in a pan of hot water if your oven runs hot or browns unevenly; the custard is done when a knife an inch from the centre comes out clean, around 175-180F internally.
- Half a grated nutmegNutmeg was bought whole and grated to order. Half a nutmeg yields roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of freshly grated spice — assertive, but the point of the dish. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is weaker and flatter; use about a teaspoon and expect less perfume.
- Rolled crackersThese are common crackers or soda crackers crushed with a rolling pin, not sweet cookie crumbs and not fine breadcrumbs. Unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits, broken to coarse crumbs, behave the same way. Cracker quantity as printed is unclear, but the milk-to-cracker ratio wants a generous cup or so for four cups of milk; add crumbs until the mixture is thickened but still pourable.
- Seeding the raisinsRaisins of the period were commonly seeded varieties, which is why the recipe parboils them and then seeds them. Modern seedless raisins skip that step entirely, though a brief soak in boiling water still plumps them and keeps them from drinking liquid out of the custard.
- Stir once, earlyThe half-hour stir is not optional. Raisins sink in a thin custard, and once the eggs begin to set you can no longer redistribute them without breaking the pudding. Stir at thirty minutes and then leave it alone.
- Brandy Sauce and Sterling SauceBoth are pudding sauces given elsewhere in the book, brandy-flavoured. Any warm brandy sauce or hard sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldWith four cups of milk plus sugar, crackers, eggs, butter and raisins the mixture runs to well over two quarts, so use a dish of at least two and a half quarts; it serves eight or so as a holiday pudding.
Baked cracker puddings were a New England thrift dish that outlived their thrift: crackers kept indefinitely in a barrel, so a cook with milk and eggs could produce a substantial sweet without fresh bread on hand. By the time this book was compiled the pudding had become ceremonial rather than economical, the raisins and the whole grated nutmeg marking it as a feast-day dish — which is what the name records. The puddings chapter can be read as showing a transition in progress: the older steamed suet puddings, buttered and covered in their moulds and steamed for hours, sit alongside oven-baked custards like this one, which the increasingly reliable coal and gas ranges of the 1890s made practical for a home cook who could now hold a low oven for two and a half hours.