Home › Puddings And Sauces › Whortleberry Pudding
Whortleberry Pudding
One quart berries, pint molasses, cup milk, tea-spoon soda, one pound and two ounces flour, one tea-spoon cloves, one of cinnamon, and one nutmeg; boil two and a half hours. - Mrs. Emma Fay.
A boiled molasses pudding of the old school: batter tied into a floured cloth or sealed in a buttered mould and steamed for hours over water. The measurements assume a cook who weighed flour and owned a pudding basin.
- WhortleberriesAn old English name carried into American use for huckleberries, and applied loosely to wild blueberries as well. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly, quart for quart, roughly 1 1/2 lb.
- The flour weightOne pound two ounces is about 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, depending on how it is scooped. Weigh it at 510 g if you can; this batter is stiff by design and the ratio matters.
- Molasses and sodaThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses, not with any other leavening. Unsulphured molasses is the better choice here; blackstrap is markedly more bitter.
- Nutmeg"One nutmeg" means a whole grated nutmeg, about 2 to 3 teaspoons. That is a large amount by modern taste; half is closer to what most palates now expect.
- What "boil" meansThe recipe does not say how the pudding is contained. A batter of this kind was either tied in a scalded, floured cloth and boiled submerged, or put into a greased mould filled two-thirds to leave room for rise and set on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the side, at a bare simmer.
- The hingeThe water must never stop and must never run dry. Top up with boiling water, never cold, or the pudding will seize and sink in the middle.
- TimingTwo and a half hours is right for a single large pudding of this size. Smaller individual moulds are done in about an hour; test with a skewer that comes out clean.
- Yield and servingServes ten to twelve. Turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce or a thin sweet pudding sauce; boiled puddings go leaden as they cool and reheat well by steaming.
Boiled and steamed puddings were a common dessert in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and this one is a plain molasses batter pudding of the kind that predates reliable home ovens. A pot of simmering water on the range needed no separate oven fire, which may be part of why so many puddings of the period are boiled rather than baked. "Whortleberry" is an English dialect name, generally traced to the bilberry of the British Isles, that American cooks transferred to the native huckleberries and blueberries they actually gathered. The attribution to Mrs. Emma Fay is characteristic of the contributed-recipe community cookbooks of the period, which assembled household recipes and printed the contributor's name as both credit and warranty.