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Nutmeg (Lb dates stoned and cut)
3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 cup molasses. 1/2 cup milk. 1 7/8 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon soda. Salt. Clove. Allspice. 1/4 teaspoon each. ½ lb. dates, stoned and cut in pieces Mix and steam same as Graham Pudding. Serve with Wine Sauce. A simple, delicious pudding without egg. Puddings may be steamed in buttered one-pound bakingpowder boxes, providing they do not leak, and are attractive in shape and easy to serve.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the batter from Graham Pudding elsewhere in the book and adds dates. The page as printed has lost most of its ingredient list, so read it as an instruction to fold 1½ lb of chopped dates into that base.
- The recipe is incompleteOnly the dates survive here; the rest of the ingredients belong to the Graham Pudding it points back to. Find that recipe first or the quantities on this page mean nothing.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground and unsifted, sold under Sylvester Graham's name. Modern whole-wheat flour is the closest match; it absorbs liquid slightly differently, so a stiff-but-droppable batter is the target rather than a fixed cup count.
- Dates1½ lb is a generous amount of fruit. Buy pitted Deglet Noor or Medjool and cut them with scissors dipped in water; the instruction to stone them by hand reflects dates commonly being sold unpitted.
- Baking-powder boxesOne-pound baking-powder tins held roughly 2 cups and were the period's throwaway pudding mould. Buttered pudding basins, coffee tins, or 8 oz ramekins do the same job; fill two-thirds full to leave room for rise, and cover with buttered foil or a tied cloth.
- SteamingA full-size pudding of this type wants 2½ to 3 hours over gently boiling water; small tins are done in about an hour. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up hot, and never let it reach the level of the mould lids.
- Egg-freeThe book flags this as a virtue: 'A simple, delicious pudding without egg.' Without egg it will be dense and moist rather than cakey, and it slices better after ten minutes' rest out of the mould.
- Wine SauceThe book's version is a butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with wine and not cooked long enough to drive off the alcohol. A hard sauce or a plain lemon sauce substitutes without complaint.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten servings from a single large mould. Steamed puddings keep several days wrapped and refrigerated and reheat well over steam.
Steamed puddings were the practical dessert of a nineteenth-century American kitchen: they needed no oven, tolerated a slow fire, and used up whatever flour, dried fruit and molasses the pantry held. The Graham flour base ties this one to Sylvester Graham, the temperance reformer whose advocacy of coarse unbolted wheat in the 1830s had, by Fannie Farmer's day, been thoroughly absorbed into ordinary cooking as simply a kind of flour. Dates arrived in quantity through the late-century import trade and turn up repeatedly in Boston Cooking School recipes as a sweetener and a bulking fruit. The suggestion to steam in one-pound baking-powder boxes is a small piece of period evidence in itself — the tins are offered permissively, as something a reader might well have to hand, provided they do not leak.