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Snowballs
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2¼ cups flour 3½ teaspoons baking powder Whites 4 eggs Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, milk, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder; then add the whites of eggs beaten stiff. Steam thirty-five minutes in buttered cups; serve with preserved fruit, quince marmalade, or strawberry sauce.
The text as printed here has been mangled in transcription: the butter and sugar quantities are missing from the top of the list, the baking powder figure is garbled, and the last four lines (butter, molasses, milk, egg) belong to a different pudding altogether. What survives is a steamed white cake, and it is workable if you treat the list with suspicion.
- The ingredient list is corruptThe method calls for creaming butter and adding sugar gradually, but neither appears in the quantities given. Both figures are lost; any butter and sugar amounts would have to be guessed rather than recovered.
- "31½ teaspoons baking powder"An obvious typesetting collision. Three and a half teaspoons is a plausible reading for 2¼ cups of flour; thirty-one and a half teaspoons would be inedible. The intended figure cannot be established from this text alone.
- The molasses lines are not part of this recipeThe trailing ¼ cup butter, 1½ cup molasses, ½ cup milk and 1 egg are stray ingredients from another entry that has run into this one. Do not add molasses to a snowball.
- Buttered cupsIndividual straight-sided custard cups, dariole moulds or ramekins, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds. The batter climbs as it steams.
- Steaming setupCups go on a rack in a covered kettle over an inch or two of simmering water, not in the water. Cover each cup with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not pit the surface, and keep the water at a bare simmer so the cakes stay pale.
- Folding the whitesThe four beaten whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder. Fold them in with a light hand at the very end; deflate them and the puddings steam dense and rubbery rather than open.
- TimingThirty-five minutes suits small cups. Test with a skewer through the centre and add five-minute increments if it comes out wet. Puddings turned out too early collapse.
- Yield and sauceThe recipe gives no yield; a batter built on 2¼ cups of flour will fill somewhere around eight to ten small cups. Turn them out hot and sauce them immediately; quince marmalade needs loosening with a spoonful of hot water.
Snowballs of this kind belong to the long English tradition of the steamed pudding, carried into American cookery. The name is most likely a reference to the appearance rather than the method: whites only, no yolks, no spice and no browning crust, so the turned-out pudding comes to the table white and round. Steaming was practical in a period when a coal range gave uneven oven heat but a kettle on the top could be trusted, and the hot pudding course was still expected at the end of a family dinner. The contribution of cooks like Fannie Farmer to dishes like this was less invention than measurement; the insistence on the level cup and level spoon is exactly what makes a garbled ingredient list like this one so conspicuous.