Home › Hot Puddings › Steamed Cranberry Pudding
Steamed Cranberry Pudding
3½ cups flour 1¼ tablespoons baking powder ½ cup milk 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 1½ cups cranberries Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Mix and sift flour and baking powder and add alternately with milk to first mixture, stir in berries, turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam three hours. Serve with thin cream, sweetened and flavored with nutmeg. 1/3 cup butter ½ cup sugar 1 egg 2¼ cups flour
A plain steamed batter pudding studded with whole raw cranberries, in the style Fannie Farmer's school taught: cream, sift, alternate, steam. The berries supply all the tartness, so the sauce does the sweetening.
- Steam, do not bakeThe mould goes into a covered kettle on a rack, with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, kept at a steady simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches and the texture is ruined.
- The mouldA large pudding mould or lidded metal bowl (this is a big batter, so allow 3 quarts or divide between two smaller moulds), buttered well, filled no more than two-thirds. If the lid does not clamp, cover with buttered parchment and foil and tie it down, or condensation will soak the top.
- Baking powder quantityThe leavening figure in the ingredient list has not survived legibly; it prints as '114 tablespoons' and may represent 1¼ tablespoons. Period recipes vary, but something in the region of a teaspoon of baking powder per cup of flour is a safe reading if you prefer to scale from the flour.
- FlourFlour of the period may have behaved somewhat differently from a modern all-purpose. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, and expect a thick drop batter rather than a pourable one.
- CranberriesFresh or frozen whole berries, not dried and not sauce. Frozen berries can go in unthawed; toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they stay suspended.
- The sauce"Thin cream" is light cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat, sweetened and grated with nutmeg. Half-and-half stands in acceptably; a hard sauce of butter and confectioners' sugar is the other traditional partner.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Let the mould stand five minutes before unmoulding, and serve hot -- a steamed pudding goes heavy and damp once it cools.
- Making aheadIt reheats well: return the wrapped pudding to the steamer for 30 to 45 minutes, or slice and steam individual portions for about ten minutes.
Steamed puddings were the practical answer to a kitchen where the oven was unreliable and the range top was always hot, and the Boston Cooking-School book carries a long run of them under Hot Puddings. Cranberries earned their place in New England cookery by keeping: harvested from the Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts bogs in autumn, they hold for months in a cold cellar or under water without processing, which made them one of the few fresh fruits a Boston household could count on through the winter. Steaming rather than baking suited the fruit as well -- the berries burst into the moist crumb instead of drying at the edges. The dish belongs to the same nineteenth-century family as plum pudding and Indian pudding, cooked in a tightly covered mould over water and turned out whole at the table.