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Puddings
Mrs. Upham.
APPLE DUMPLING. - One quart of flour, two table spoonsful baking powder, two tablespoonsful of lard or butter rubbed in flour, a little salt. Mix with water soft enough to roll. Slice your apples thin. Make either one large one, or several small ones.
STEAM FRUIT PUDDING. - One cup sour milk, two eggs, butter size of half an egg, one teaspoonful of soda, a little salt. Stir flour to make a stiff batter.
SAUCE FOR PUDDING. -One half cup boiling water, one tablespoon corn starch, two tablespoonsful vinegar, one tablespoonful of butter, one cup sugar, one-half nutmeg.
FLOATING ISLAND. - Put a quart of milk over to boil, sugar, salt, and flavouring to taste ; separate three eggs ; beat the whites to a stiff froth; drop them in the boiling milk from a tablespoon, letting them remain half a second; then take two tablespoonsful and one half of corn starch; put it into the boiling milk; let it remain five minutes, then add the yolks ; let it then boil two minutes, and take it off to cool; then place it in a glass dish; drop the whites upon it with a spoonful of currant jelly on each.
Four short contributions from one cook, written in the shorthand of a community cookbook where everyone was assumed to know the rest. Cooking methods and times are largely missing, so the notes below fill the gaps.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of all-purpose flour. The dumpling dough is a standard biscuit crust: 4 cups flour, the baking powder (see below), 2 tbsp fat, salt, and enough water to bring it together softly.
- Baking powder then and nowNineteenth-century baking powders varied in strength and composition, and many were less consistent than today's double-acting product. Two tablespoons for a quart of flour is more than a modern cook needs; about 4 teaspoons of modern powder is nearer the mark.
- The dumplings need a cooking instructionNone is given. Apple dumplings of this type were commonly boiled or steamed in a floured cloth for about 45 minutes to an hour, or, in a modern oven, baked at around 375F for 40-45 minutes until the pastry is browned and the apple tender. Slicing the apples thin, as directed, helps either method along; the recipe supplies no cooking time of its own.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Pasteurized milk left out simply spoils. Use buttermilk, or 1 cup milk with 1 tbsp lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- The fruit in the fruit puddingThe recipe never says what fruit or how much. A batter of this size will carry roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of berries, chopped apple, or soaked dried fruit folded in at the end. Steam in a greased covered basin, two-thirds full, set in simmering water for about 1 1/2 hours.
- Half a nutmegThat is a great deal — roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons grated. A quarter of that is ample for most tastes in a cup of sauce. The sauce itself is a cornstarch-thickened sweet-sour sauce: slake the starch in the vinegar before it meets the boiling water or it will lump.
- Floating island: the meringuesHalf a second in the milk will not set egg white. Poached meringues need 2 to 3 minutes, turned once, in milk held just below a simmer. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and drain on a cloth before the custard is made, or they will weep into it.
- Floating island: the custardTwo and a half tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart of milk gives a pouring custard rather than a set one. Temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot milk before adding them. The starch gives some protection against curdling, but with this little of it a hard two-minute boil risks a grainy custard, so keep the pan just below boiling once the yolks are in.
- YieldThe dumpling dough will make one large dumpling or roughly six to eight small ones; the steamed pudding and the floating island, on a quart of milk, should each serve about six.
Floating island is often linked to the French île flottante and oeufs à la neige, poached meringue on custard, though eighteenth-century English floating islands were frequently a layered cream-and-sponge confection instead; in one form or another the dish was still a standard company dessert when this book was compiled. What is telling here is the cornstarch: a true floating island is thickened with egg yolks alone, but boxed cornstarch had become cheap and reliable by the 1870s, and it may well have served here to make a custard that would not curdle and could stretch three eggs across a quart of milk. The other three entries show the same economy — sour milk that would otherwise be wasted, lard in the dumpling crust, a sauce built from vinegar and sugar rather than cream or wine. Recipes in books like this were submitted by name by local women, printed almost as received, and assumed a reader who already knew how long to steam a pudding; the gaps are not carelessness so much as a shared body of knowledge that never needed writing down.