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Steamed Bread Pudding
1 pint bread-crumbs 1 cup cold water 1 cup molasses 1 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in hot water 1 egg, well beaten 1 cup flour 1 teaspoonful cinnamon 1 teaspoonful clove 1 cup raisins, cleaned teaspoonful salt Mix together and steam three hours. If half rule is used, do not divide the egg. Nuts may be substituted for part of raisins if desired. Serve with hard sauce.
A plain steamed spice pudding built on stale bread and molasses, closer to a brown betty batter than to a suet pudding. It needs a mold, a pot with a lid, and three uninterrupted hours.
- The pint of crumbsA pint is 2 cups by volume, not by weight. Use soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, packed lightly; dry commercial crumbs will drink the liquid and give a dense, sandy pudding.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses, not to work alone as a leavener. Dissolve it in a tablespoon or two of hot water and stir it in last, then get the pudding into the steamer promptly.
- Molasses typeUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than the molasses a recipe like this assumes and will dominate the spices.
- The saltThe original reads "teaspoonful salt" with no quantity at all, so a figure has dropped out. A full teaspoon against one cup of flour is on the high side; half is the safer reading.
- Mold and potGrease a 2½-quart pudding mold or coffee tin (the batter runs to about 1½ quarts) and fill it no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down, set it on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the mold.
- Three hours means three hoursKeep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops. Letting the pot run dry or letting it boil hard enough to slop into the mold are the two ways this fails. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a little vanilla, brandy or rum, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding. There is no cooking involved; the contrast of cold sauce melting on hot pudding is the point.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings. It reheats well by re-steaming for 20 to 30 minutes.
Steamed puddings survived in American home cooking long after open-hearth boiling gave way to ranges, partly because they ask nothing of an oven and partly because they absorb stale bread, a common leftover in any household that baked or bought bread daily. The molasses-and-spice profile here is the older, cheaper cousin of the raisin-studded Christmas pudding: no suet, no brandy soaking, no month of ripening, just crumbs, cheap sweetening and whatever dried fruit was in the pantry. The instruction to keep the whole egg when halving the recipe is a small tell about how these books were actually used, in kitchens scaling down for smaller families.