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Estelle Pudding
Three eggs well beaten, two and a half table-spoons sugar, two of butter, three-fourths cup sweet milk, one of raisins chopped fine, one table-spoon baking powder, flour to make it the consistency of cake batter; or, one-half measure each of Horsford's Bread Preparation and one coffee-cup flour; steam thirty-five minutes, and serve with cold cream sauce. -Mrs. Andrew Wilson
A small steamed pudding of the kind that came together from pantry staples in under an hour. The recipe assumes you know what a steamer is and how thick cake batter should be, so the useful work here is filling in the parts it takes for granted.
- Batter consistency is the whole recipeFlour is given as "enough," with the recipe's own guide being "the consistency of cake batter": thick but still just pourable. The alternative version's "one coffee-cup flour" suggests roughly a cup or a little more will bring three eggs and three-quarters cup of milk to that point, but add it in stages.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA two-part phosphate leavening sold in the late nineteenth century, one packet of acid phosphate and one of bicarbonate, to be measured in equal parts. It is long discontinued. Use the tablespoon of baking powder given in the first version instead, and treat the alternative as a historical footnote.
- A tablespoon of baking powder is a lotModern double-acting powder releases gas in two stages and behaves differently from the single-acting powders available in the 1880s. Two teaspoons is likely closer to the intended lift for about a cup of flour; a full tablespoon risks a soapy, metallic edge.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk or soured milk that shared the same shelf and called for soda rather than baking powder.
- The sugar is deliberately lowThe sugar is low -- Two and a half tablespoons is barely sweet on its own; the cup of raisins and the cream sauce carry most of the sweetness.
- Steaming setupButter a mold or basin, fill it no more than two-thirds, cover it tightly with foil or a cloth tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as needed.
- Thirty-five minutes means smallThat timing suits individual cups or a shallow mold. A single deep pudding basin of this batter will likely need an hour or more; test with a skewer to the center.
- Cold cream sauceIn period cookbooks this usually means a soft uncooked sauce of butter creamed with powdered sugar, thinned with cream and flavored with vanilla or nutmeg, served cold against the hot pudding rather than a cooked custard.
- YieldAbout four to six servings, depending on how generous the sauce is.
Steamed puddings filled the gap between the boiled cloth puddings of the English tradition and the oven cakes that came with reliable ranges: they needed only a pot, a lid and a steady fire, which suited a wood stove where oven heat was the least controllable thing in the kitchen. The alternative leavening here is a rough guide to the recipe's period, though Horsford's products were sold across several decades. Horsford's Bread Preparation, made by the Rumford Chemical Works in Rhode Island and developed from Eben Horsford's work on calcium acid phosphate, was sold as two separate powders to be measured in equal parts, and it was aggressively marketed to American housewives in the 1870s and 1880s as a purer substitute for cream of tartar and saleratus. The contributor's recipe pairs a half measure each with a coffee-cup of flour. The name Estelle, like the many puddings in this section attached to a woman's first name, was likely a family or church-supper label rather than anything with a documented origin; The Dixie Cook Book collected such recipes over signature, and Mrs. Andrew Wilson's contribution stands as it was sent in.