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Steamed Apple Pudding
4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 3/4 cup milk 4 apples cut in eighths Mix and sift dry ingredients; work in butter with tips of fingers, add milk gradually, mixing with a knife; toss on floured board, pat and roll out, place apples on middle of dough, and sprinkle with one tablespoon sugar mixed with one-fourth teaspoon each of salt and nutmeg; bring dough around apples and carefully lift into buttered mould or fivepound lard pail; or apples may be sprinkled over dough, and 1 dough rolled like a jelly roll; cover closely, and steam one hour and twenty minutes; serve with Vanilla or Cold Sauce. Twice the number of apples may be sprinkled with sugar and cooked until soft in granite kettle placed on top of range, covered with dough, rolled size to fit in kettle, then kettle covered tightly, and dough steamed fifteen minutes. When turned on dish for serving, apples will be on top.
A suet-less steamed pudding built on baking-powder biscuit dough — essentially a boiled apple dumpling. The printed ingredient list in this edition drops its first line, so read the note on flour before starting.
- The missing flourThe list begins with baking powder because the flour line has dropped out of the printed page. Judging by the book's standard baking-powder dough, the missing line is about 2 cups of flour to the 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons butter and 3/4 cup milk. Without it you have no pudding.
- Baking powder strengthFour teaspoons to two cups is generous by modern standards and reflects the single-acting powders of the period. With modern double-acting powder many cooks find 2 to 3 teaspoons enough.
- The five-pound lard pailA cylindrical tin holding roughly 2 to 2 1/2 quarts. A 1.5 to 2 quart pudding basin, a straight-sided metal bowl, or a clean coffee tin of similar volume all work. Butter it well and leave headroom for the dough to rise.
- Covering closelyThis is the hinge. Steam condensing onto the dough turns the crust to paste. Cover with buttered parchment or foil pleated across the centre and tie it down, then set the mould on a rack above, not in, gently boiling water.
- Granite kettleSpeckled grey enamelled steel, standard on ranges of the period. Any wide, heavy pot with a tight lid serves for the second method, where the crust steams on top of the stewing apples like a cobbler and is inverted at the table.
- The applesFour apples cut in eighths implies firm cooking apples; New England varieties such as Baldwin or Greening would have been available, though the recipe names none. Anything that holds shape works; softer dessert varieties collapse into sauce inside the crust.
- TimingAn hour and twenty minutes is right for the moulded version and is not padding: the dough has to cook through by conducted steam alone. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- Sauces and yieldSauces -- Both Vanilla Sauce and Cold Sauce are cross-references to the sauce chapter of the same book; Cold Sauce is of the creamed butter-and-sugar type. Look them up rather than improvising.
Steamed and boiled puddings dominated the hot-pudding chapter of nineteenth-century American cookbooks for a practical reason: a coal or wood range gave reliable heat on top long before it gave reliable heat inside. A pot of simmering water was the most controllable oven a cook had. This version is a thrifty descendant of the English apple dumpling, with baking-powder dough standing in for the older suet crust — a substitution made possible once chemical leavenings became cheap in the second half of the century. The instruction to use a five-pound lard pail is worth noticing on its own: it assumes a household that bought lard by the pail and kept the tins, which is exactly the kind of unremarked domestic detail these books preserve better than any other source.