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Steamed Chocolate Pudding
3 tablespoons butter 2/3 cup sugar 1 egg 1 cup milk 2¼ cups flour 4½ teaspoons baking powder 2½ squares unsweetened chocolate ¼ teaspoon salt Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten. Mix and sift flour with baking powder and salt, and add alternately with milk to first mixture, then add chocolate, melted. Turn into a buttered mould. Cover, and steam two hours. Serve with
A plain steamed batter pudding from Fannie Farmer, closer to a dense cake than to a custard. Two of the quantities have been mangled by the scanner and need reading back to their originals.
- The baking powderThe printed page gives 4½ teaspoons of baking powder for 2¼ cups of flour, a high proportion by modern standards. Period recipes routinely called for more than we would now; with modern double-acting powder, 2 to 2½ teaspoons will do.
- Squares of chocolateA square of unsweetened baking chocolate is 1 ounce, so 2 1/2 squares is 2 1/2 oz. Unsweetened, not bittersweet — the 2/3 cup of sugar is all the sweetening the batter gets.
- Fill the mould two-thirdsThe batter rises considerably in the steam. A 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or mould filled no more than two-thirds full, buttered and covered tightly with a lid or with foil tied down, gives it room.
- How to steam itSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to reach halfway up the sides, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Two hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. Steam is a gentle, moist heat and a batter this thick needs the full period; test with a skewer to the centre, which should come out clean. Unmould after ten minutes' rest.
- The missing sauceThe text breaks off at "Serve with" — in this book the standard partners for a steamed chocolate pudding are hard sauce, a vanilla or foamy sauce, or plain thin cream. Any of them works; the pudding itself is not sweet enough to eat dry.
- YieldServes six to eight, warm. Leftovers reheat well in the mould over steam for 20 to 30 minutes, which is a better result than a microwave gives.
Steamed puddings sat in the hot-pudding chapter of American cookbooks of the period because they suited the kitchens of the time: a mould on a rack over simmering water needed no reliable oven thermostat and no close watching, and the pot was already on the range. Chocolate versions like this one belong to the turn of the century, when cooks began adding unsweetened baking chocolate to batters that had previously been flavoured with molasses, suet and dried fruit. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published under Fannie Farmer's name in 1896, was built around exactly this kind of level-measurement, repeatable formula he dry-and-liquid addition appear across dozens of its cakes and puddings, which is why the instructions here are so terse.