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What to Do with Left-Over Cake
1 well-beaten egg 3/4 cup chopped raisins + cup molasses (Porto Rico) 1/4 cup stewed prunes, chopped + teaspoonful soda 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls lemon-juice Mock Plum Pudding (Cake) Two cups stale cake-crumbs softened in about one-quarter cup hot milk. If crumbs are very dry it may take a little more milk. Add to the softened crumbs I well-beaten egg 1/4 cup sugar 2 teaspoonfuls mixed spices 1/4 cup molasses (Porto 1/4 teaspoonful soda Rico) teaspoonful salt 1/4 cup stewed prunes, 2 teaspoonfuls lemonchopped juice cup chopped raisins 1/4 cup flour Bake in a moderate oven forty-five minutes.
Serve hot with foamy sauce.
A steamed-pudding flavour profile achieved by baking, using stale cake as the starch base in place of breadcrumbs and suet. The proportions of the wet ingredients are given loosely, so judge by texture rather than volume.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F for the stated forty-five minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre; the batter is heavy with fruit and molasses and will look underdone at the surface before the middle sets.
- Cake crumbsPlain butter cake, pound cake or sponge all work. Avoid heavily iced or chocolate cake, which will fight the spices, and rub the crumbs fine so they hydrate evenly in the hot milk.
- Softening the crumbsA quarter cup of hot milk to two cups of crumbs gives a stiff, damp mass, not a batter. Let it stand five minutes before adding anything else so the crumbs swell fully; adding more milk too early gives a soggy pudding.
- Porto Rico molassesThis means an unsulphured cane molasses of medium colour, not blackstrap. Ordinary supermarket unsulphured molasses is the right substitute; blackstrap will turn the pudding bitter.
- Mixed spicesPeriod plum-pudding blends generally drew on cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice, sometimes with ginger, though proportions varied. Two teaspoons of a commercial pumpkin-pie or mixed-spice blend is a fair equivalent.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is there to neutralise the acid in the molasses and lift a batter that has no other leavening. It can be sifted with the flour or, as was common in period recipes, stirred into the molasses; either way, get the pudding into the oven promptly.
- PrunesStew and pit them, then chop coarsely and drain well. Wet fruit can sink and leave a heavy, gummy layer at the bottom of the dish.
- Dish and yieldA greased 1.5-quart baking dish or a 6-cup loaf pan suits this quantity, which serves five or six. It unmoulds better after ten minutes' rest.
- Foamy sauceThe period sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar beaten with egg and thinned with hot water, whisked over hot water until it thickens and foams. Cook it to 160F if you make one; do not leave it uncooked.
Left-over cookery books of the 1910s and 1920s treated stale cake the way earlier ones treated stale bread: as a starch to be recovered rather than discarded, and the mock pudding was one common device for doing it. A genuine plum pudding meant suet, brandy, hours of steaming and weeks of maturing; "mock" here signals that the spice, molasses and dried fruit have been kept while the expensive fat and the long steaming have been dropped, with cake crumbs supplying both flour and richness. Prunes standing in for the raisins and currants of the traditional pudding are a mark of the same economy, prunes being generally reckoned among the cheaper dried fruits in American stores at the time. The name promises a Christmas dish; the method delivers a plain baked pudding out of yesterday's leavings, which is precisely the bargain these books were written to make.