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Steamed Peach Pudding
To be successful with this kind of pudding the cook must see that the water is boiling violently when the pudding is placed over it, and must not allow it to fall below the boiling point at any time while the pudding is cooking. Make a soft dough of the following ingredients: One pint of flour; one tablespoon of butter; one-half pint of milk; one large teaspoon of baking powder; one-half teaspoon of salt; one and one-half pints of peaches. Sift the salt, baking powder and flour together, rub in the butter and add the milk. The result will be a dough too soft to roll out and which must be dipped with a spoon. The peaches should be peeled, stoned and cut into rather thick slices. Place the sliced fruit in the pudding-dish, first greasing the sides of the dish with butter; drop the dough by the spoon over the fruit and set the dish in a steamer over a kettle of rapidly boiling water, covering the steamer tightly. Boil for one hour and turn the pudding out without breaking and with the top part down. This brings the peaches uppermost when the pudding is sent to table. Serve with a liquid sauce.
A steamed cobbler in reverse: the fruit goes in first, the biscuit dough on top, and the whole thing is inverted onto the platter so the peaches come to table uppermost. The instruction that matters is the first one — the water must be at a rolling boil before the dish goes in and must never drop below it, or the baking powder spends its lift before the crumb sets and you get a dense, gluey layer.
- The measurements, convertedA pint of flour is 2 cups (about 8 to 9 oz); half a pint of milk is 1 cup; a pint and a half of peaches is 3 cups of thick slices, roughly four to five medium peaches. The "large teaspoon" of baking powder is imprecise; anything from a heaping teaspoon to 2 teaspoons is a defensible reading.
- Baking powder strengthPowders of this period were generally single-acting and less reliable than modern ones, which may be why period recipes call for loosely measured or generous amounts. Around 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder to 2 cups of flour works; much more can leave a metallic edge.
- Keeping the boilHave a kettle of boiling water at hand and top the steamer up from it, never with cold water. A tight lid matters — a loose one drops the steam temperature and lengthens the hour unpredictably.
- Condensation on the doughThe original does not mention covering the pudding-dish itself. Laying a piece of parchment or a cloth under the steamer lid keeps drips off the surface of the dough, which otherwise steams soggy on top.
- Why grease only the sidesGreasing -- The recipe butters only the sides, presumably so the pudding releases when inverted, the bottom being covered by fruit. Loosen the edge with a knife before turning out, and use a deep platter — the peach juice runs.
- PeachesRipe peaches peel most easily after 30 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold; freestones are simply easier to stone. Underripe fruit will not soften much in an hour of steam; if the peaches are hard, expect a firmer result rather than a saucy one.
- Testing for donenessAt one hour the dough should be risen, dry to the touch and clean on a skewer. Steamed batters do not brown, so colour tells you nothing.
- The "liquid sauce"This means a pourable pudding sauce rather than a hard sauce — a thin vanilla or lemon sauce, or cream. Sauces of that kind would be found elsewhere in the book.
- YieldServes six in a 1½- to 2-quart dish. It is best eaten within an hour of turning out; steamed biscuit dough goes heavy as it cools.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine house that published the Delineator, and it treats steaming as a routine skill rather than a novelty — steamers and boilers were common range equipment, and puddings cooked over water freed the oven for other work. The dish itself is a fruit cobbler cooked by steam instead of dry heat, a technique with a long English pedigree in boiled and steamed puddings; the soft baking-powder dough, too slack to roll and simply dropped from a spoon, came in alongside the older suet and yeast doughs as chemical leavens spread in the second half of the nineteenth century. The inversion at the end is what gives the recipe its point: turned out, it is peaches under a syrup of their own juice, served in the season when fresh fruit was worth building a pudding around.