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Steamed Blueberry Pudding
Mix and sift dry ingredients and work in butter same as for Steamed Apple Pudding. Add one cup each of milk, and blueberries rolled in flour; turn into buttered mould and steam one and one-half hours. Serve with Creamy Sauce.
This is a variation entry: the batter itself lives in the Steamed Apple Pudding recipe a few pages earlier, and this page only tells you what to change. Read both before starting.
- The missing ingredient list"Mix and sift dry ingredients and work in butter same as for Steamed Apple Pudding" means turning back to that recipe for the dry ingredients, the butter and their proportions. Do not try to reconstruct it from this page alone; the quantities are genuinely absent here.
- Flouring the berriesThis is the hinge. Blueberries tossed in dry flour until dusty stay suspended in a stiff batter; unfloured, they sink to the bottom of the mould and stew into a wet layer. Toss them just before folding in, not in advance, or the flour turns to paste.
- What steaming meansThe mould sits on a rack in a covered kettle with boiling water reaching one-third to halfway up its side, not immersed. Keep the water at a steady boil for the full time and top it up with boiling water from a kettle so the temperature never drops.
- The mouldA one-and-a-half to two quart pudding mould or basin, buttered, filled no more than two-thirds so the pudding can rise. Cover it — a fitted lid, or buttered parchment and foil tied down — or condensation from the lid of the kettle will soak the top.
- Time and testingAn hour and a half is right for a mould of this size. Test with a skewer to the centre: it should come out clean apart from berry juice. A steamed pudding will not brown, so colour tells you nothing.
- BerriesFresh cultivated blueberries are larger and wetter than the small wild berries the book assumes; drain them well. Frozen berries work if used still frozen and floured, but expect slightly longer cooking and more bleeding into the crumb.
- Creamy SauceThe companion sauce in this book appears to be a creamed butter-and-sugar sauce rather than a cooked custard; check its own page for the exact composition. Any hard sauce or thin vanilla custard serves the same purpose: the pudding is deliberately plain and wants something rich poured over it.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Turn it out hot; steamed puddings that cool in the mould stick, and reheating a wedge in a covered dish over simmering water restores it better than a microwave.
Steamed puddings dominate this section because they suited the equipment of the nineteenth-century kitchen: a coal or wood range gave an unreliable, hard-to-regulate oven, but a kettle of boiling water on the top held a far steadier temperature for hours, with no thermometer and little judgement required. The technique came to New England from English boiled and steamed puddings, and the recipes here are built in families — fruit variations listed as brief departures from one basic batter, exactly as this page is. Blueberries were the natural summer choice in Massachusetts; the trick of rolling fruit in flour to keep it from sinking was already old household practice, and it appears throughout nineteenth-century American cookery without attribution to anyone in particular.