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Ten Cent Pudding
Mrs. Joseph Robinson.
One cup of molasses, one cup of suet, one cup of currants, one cup of raisins, one and a half cups of milk, quarter of a teaspoonful of soda, three cups flour, spices to taste, and a little brandy or whiskey. If mixed over night so much the better, adding the soda in the morning dissolved in a little warm water; tie in a cloth like plum pudding, and steam three hours. This size must not be boiled. If double quantity is made four hours' steaming i required. Sauce made as for plum pudding, or wine sauc This pudding is very nice warmed up the second day.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the sort a Victorian household made from pantry staples — the "ten cent" of the title is the cost of the ingredients, not a measure of ambition. It works, but a few of the instructions assume a kitchen you no longer have.
- The hinge: steam, do not boilThe original is emphatic that a single quantity must be steamed rather than submerged. It gives no reason, but a batter this loose — 3 cups of flour to 1½ cups milk plus molasses — risks taking on water through the cloth and turning sodden if boiled outright. Set the tied pudding on a rack or trivet above an inch or two of simmering water in a covered pot, and top the water up with boiling water as it goes down.
- SuetThis means raw beef kidney suet, finely chopped or grated — one cup is roughly 4 to 5 oz. Butchers will still sell it, and packaged shredded suet is sold in the UK; vegetarian shredded suet behaves much the same. Frozen suet grates far more easily than chilled.
- Cup measuresNineteenth-century cups were not standardised and may have run a little under the modern 8 fl oz, but the recipe is proportional enough that a modern cup throughout is fine. Pack the currants and raisins loosely.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon of baking soda is doing one job: neutralising the acid in the molasses so the pudding rises a little and darkens. Dissolving it in warm water and adding it last, as directed, is genuinely worth doing — soda stirred into a batter that then sits overnight will spend its lift before it reaches the pot.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and harsher than what was generally sold as molasses in this period. Golden syrup is not a substitute here; the colour and the soda reaction both depend on the molasses.
- Spices to tasteFor this quantity, about 1 teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon each of nutmeg and ginger, and a pinch of cloves is a reasonable reading of 'spices to taste'. The 'little brandy or whiskey' is probably a tablespoon or two.
- The clothScald a square of unbleached cotton or a floursack towel, wring it out, flour the inside surface generously, fill it, and tie with string leaving room for expansion. A greased 2-quart pudding basin with pleated foil and a lid of parchment is easier to manage, though the timing may not be identical to the cloth.
- Yield and reheatingServes 8 generously. The note about it being nice the second day is accurate — steam slices for 15 minutes or microwave individual portions briefly. The sauce referred to is a sweet hard sauce or a wine sauce; either wants to be sharper than the pudding.
Puddings named for their price were a genre in mid-century household cookery, alongside "poor man's pudding" and "economy cake": the title is a selling point, promising the ceremony of a boiled plum pudding at a fraction of the outlay in eggs, butter and brandy. What makes this one cheap is what it leaves out: no eggs at all, milk instead of cream, molasses instead of sugar, and a single spoonful of spirits where a Christmas pudding would take a gill. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was compiled from contributions by named local women to raise funds for the Chicago Home for the Friendless, which is why Mrs. Joseph Robinson's name sits above the ingredients; it is often cited among the early American community charity cookbooks, though Civil War sanitary-fair cookbooks precede it. Suet puddings of this kind were everyday winter food rather than festive.