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Steamed Chocolate Pudding
2 cups flour
½ cup hot mashed potatoes
4½ teaspoons baking-powder
1 egg
¼ teaspoon salt
2½ squares chocolate
1 cup corn sirup
3 tablespoons butter
½ cup water
Mix and sift the flour, baking-powder and salt. Mix the sirup with the water and add to the flour mixture. Stir in the mashed potatoes and the beaten egg. Add the chocolate, which has been melted over hot water, and the melted fat. Mix well, pour into greased individual molds and steam two hours. Serve with any desired sauce.
A wartime-style economy pudding: corn syrup stands in for sugar and mashed potato for part of the fat and moisture. It works, but a few of the figures need translating.
- The chocolate quantityThe printed page reads 2½ squares, as our text now gives. Squares of unsweetened baking chocolate in this period were one ounce each, so this is about 2½ ounces.
- Corn sirupPlain light corn syrup, not the dark cane-flavoured kind and not high-fructose sweetener. It carries less sweetening power than an equal volume of sugar, so the pudding is mild rather than rich.
- The potato is structuralHalf a cup of hot mashed potato, best plain rather than enriched with milk or butter since the recipe does not call for either, helps keep the crumb moist. Cool it slightly so it does not cook the egg, and press out lumps or they show as pale streaks.
- Baking powderFour and a half teaspoons to 2 cups flour is heavy by current practice, roughly double the usual 1 to 1¼ teaspoons per cup. Two to three teaspoons gives plenty of lift in a steamed batter and avoids the faint metallic aftertaste.
- "Melted fat"That is the 3 tablespoons of butter, melted, added last as the recipe directs.
- Setting up the steamerGrease the molds and fill them two-thirds full, cover each with greased foil or a tied cloth, and stand them on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up their sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up from a boiling kettle so the temperature never drops.
- Two hours is for a large moldTwo hours is long for individual molds -- Molds of about 1 cup will usually test done in 45 to 60 minutes, when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back, though the recipe as printed calls for the full two hours. The longer time suits a single quart-sized pudding basin.
- Yield and sauceEnough for six to eight individual puddings. A thin vanilla custard, hard sauce, or a warm chocolate sauce all suit it; the pudding itself is not very sweet and wants one of them.
Puddings built on mashed potato and corn syrup belong to the conservation cookery that spread through American kitchens during and after the First World War, when wheat, sugar and fats were among the things households were asked to stretch. Potato added bulk and moisture in place of some flour and fat, and corn syrup, a domestic product made from cornstarch, was used in place of cane sugar, much of which was imported. Recipes of exactly this type -- thrifty, dependable, and reliant on the steamer rather than the oven -- suited a kitchen where a coal or wood range was already being fired for other work and a pudding could sit on top of it. The habit of steaming sweet puddings in individual molds is generally traced to English practice.