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Steamed Cherry Pudding
2 cups cherries
2½ cups flour
½ cup shortening
4 teaspoons baking-powder
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
2 eggs
Cream the fat and sugar and add the beaten eggs. Sift together the flour and baking-powder and add to the first mixture alternately with the milk. The cherries should be stoned and the juice drained off. Stir the cherries into the dough, turn it into greased individual molds and steam for one hour. Serve with a cherry sauce.
A plain steamed batter pudding of the kind that filled the puddings chapter of nearly every early twentieth-century American book. The batter is stiff — closer to a drop biscuit dough than a cake — and that is intentional, since it has to hold the fruit in suspension through an hour of steam.
- The hinge: keep the steam gentle and constantSet the covered molds on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching a third to halfway up their sides, and keep the water at a bare simmer with the lid on. A hard boil rocks the molds and lets water in; letting the pot run dry scorches the bottoms, so top up with boiling water as needed.
- ShorteningIn American cookbooks of this period the word covered lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco, and sometimes butter. Butter works and tastes better; softened, at room temperature, so it creams properly with the sugar.
- Baking-powderFour teaspoons to 2½ cups flour is heavier than current practice, which would use about 3 teaspoons; older powders may also have been less reliable. With modern double-acting powder 3 teaspoons is ample, and too much can leave a soapy, metallic edge.
- Molds and filling"Individual molds" means small metal or ceramic dariole molds, custard cups or straight-sided ramekins of about 6 to 8 ounces. Grease them well, fill only two-thirds full, and cover each tightly with greased foil or parchment tied down, or the batter climbs and steam condensate soaks the tops.
- The cherriesSour pie cherries were probably the intended fruit, though the recipe simply says cherries. Fresh sour or sweet cherries, stoned, are fine; canned or thawed frozen cherries must be drained thoroughly and patted dry, since surplus juice turns the crumb gummy. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps keep them from sinking.
- TimingOne hour is right for molds of this size — test with a skewer, which should come out clean. A single large 1½-quart mold takes closer to 1¾ to 2 hours.
- Cherry sauceNone is given. The reserved cherry juice, thickened with a teaspoon or two of cornstarch per cup, sweetened to taste and finished with a squeeze of lemon, is a period-appropriate answer.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten 6-ounce puddings, filled two-thirds full. They reheat well: 10 to 15 minutes back in the steamer, covered.
Steamed puddings survived in American cookbooks long after the coal range gave way to gas because they solved a real problem — the top of the stove was always available, and a mold of batter set over simmering water needed no oven and no watching. Butterick, a pattern company that had built a large publishing arm around its magazines for homemakers, aimed this sort of recipe squarely at the middle-class cook working without staff: one bowl, common storecupboard proportions (a cup of sugar, a cup of milk, two eggs), and the fruit whatever was in season or in the jar. Cherry versions turn up wherever sour cherries were grown and canned in quantity, and the direction to steam in "individual molds" rather than one large basin is worth noting.