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Amherst Pudding
Mrs. F. M. Cragin.
Three cups of flour, one of suet, one of milk, one of molasses, two of raisins; salt and spice to your taste; one teaspoon of saleratus ; boil in a bag three hours. For sauce: One cup of sugar, one-half of butter, one egg.
A New England boiled suet pudding of the plainest sort: flour, fat, molasses and fruit, tied in a cloth and boiled for hours. The one thing to get right is the water — it must stay at a steady boil the whole three hours, and topping up must be done with boiling water or the pudding stops cooking and turns heavy.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the period leavening, potassium or sodium bicarbonate depending on the date; treat it as baking soda. One teaspoon is workable as written, and it is there to react with the acidic molasses; there is no other leavening in the pudding.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, grated or chopped fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen butter grated on a box grater is the usual substitute, though the crumb comes out softer.
- Boiling in a bagA square of unbleached cotton, scalded, floured on the inside, filled two-thirds full and tied with string leaving room to swell. It goes into a large pot of boiling water, lifted off the bottom on a plate or rack, and stays covered by water for the full three hours.
- Or steam it in a moldIt can also be steamed in a buttered mold or pudding basin comfortably larger than the batter (the mix comes to about two quarts, so allow room to rise), covered and set on a rack in a covered pot of simmering water. Reckon on about the same three hours, for a broadly similar if not identical pudding, and it is easier to manage.
- Cup sizesNineteenth-century "cups" in contributed recipes are approximate. Treat this as three parts flour to one each of suet, milk and molasses by volume; if the batter will not hold a spoon upright, add flour a little at a time.
- Spice"Spice to your taste" in a molasses pudding of this date means cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves or allspice, or a mixture — about a teaspoon in total for this quantity.
- The sauce, and the raw eggOne cup sugar, half a cup butter and one egg beaten together makes a rich creamed sauce of the hard-sauce family, served in spoonfuls on the hot pudding. As written the egg is never cooked. Use a pasteurized egg, or leave the egg out entirely and beat the butter and sugar with a spoonful of cream instead.
- YieldServes eight to ten. It slices better after resting ten minutes out of the cloth, and leftovers are often sliced and fried in butter the next day.
Boiled puddings like this one were the backbone of winter dessert: no oven required, no eggs to speak of, and molasses standing in for sugar that cost more. Suet made the crumb rich, the pudding cloth made it portable, and three hours over the fire fitted a day when the stove was lit anyway. Names of this kind Amherst, Marlborough, Berkshire generally attach to a town rather than to any documented origin, and in a subscription cookbook they usually travelled with the contributor; Mrs. Cragin's name beside it is doing the work a brand name would do today, vouching that this version had been made and eaten many times. The recipe's telegraphic style is characteristic of the genre: it assumes the reader already knows how to tie a pudding bag and how a batter should look, and records only the proportions worth copying down.