Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Cup Puddings
Cup Puddings
Mrs. Midgley.
Three eggs, three-quarters of a cup of sugar, the same of flour, the same of milk, about half a cup of butter, and a teaspoonful and a half of Cook's Friend baking powder, butter your cups, pour in a small quantity of preserves, then fill with batter half way, and steam twenty minutes.
A steamed sponge in individual cups with jam at the bottom, in the same family as the English jam sponge pudding. The recipe assumes you know how to build a cake batter, so it names ingredients rather than method.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerSteamed puddings want gentle, steady steam, not a hard boil. A rolling boil rocks the cups, drives water in under the covers, and gives you a coarse, tunnelled crumb.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period, most likely a cream-of-tartar-and-soda type powder. Use 1 1/2 teaspoons of ordinary double-acting baking powder.
- "Cups" as a vesselThe recipe says only "cups," which probably means teacups or small moulds, on the order of 5 to 6 fl oz. Ramekins or dariole moulds work; anything you use must be heatproof, since it sits in simmering water for 20 minutes. Butter them thoroughly, right to the rim.
- "About half a cup of butter"Genuinely loose in the original, and generous against three-quarters of a cup of flour. Half a cup is 4 oz; a scant half cup gives a lighter pudding and I would err on that side.
- Method the recipe leaves outCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Jam in the bottom of each cup, batter to no more than halfway so it has room to climb.
- Cover the cupsTie on rounds of buttered parchment or crimp foil over each cup, or condensation from the pan lid will drip onto the sponges and pit the surface.
- Judging 20 minutesTwenty minutes suits cups of about 5 oz. A skewer into the sponge, not the jam, should come out clean, and the top should spring back. Larger moulds need 30 to 40 minutes.
- Yield and servingThe number depends on the size of your cups, since they are filled only halfway. Run a knife round each and turn out so the preserve runs down the sides; serve hot with cream, custard, or a thin sweet sauce.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was assembled from contributions by named local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why so many of its recipes carry a surname like Mrs. Midgley's rather than a house style. Steamed cup puddings belong to the British tradition that Ontario kitchens inherited wholesale: a boiled or steamed sweet pudding needed only a pot of water and a covered mould, which mattered when a wood-fired range gave you an unreliable oven and a reliable simmer. The named baking powder is a period marker of its own. Cook's Friend was a Canadian chemical leavener sold in this period, and cookbook writers of the 1870s often specified brands, powders varying enough in strength that a generic "teaspoonful of baking powder" was not yet a dependable instruction.