Home › Puddings and Dessert Sauces › Steamed Chocolate Pudding
Steamed Chocolate Pudding
1 egg 2½ teaspoons baking-powder 1 cup milk teaspoon salt 1½-1 cups flour 2 squares chocolate Cream shortening, and gradually, add egg yolk well beaten. Mix and sift flour with baking powder and salt, add alternately with milk to first flour with baking powder and salt, add alternately with milk to first mixture. Then add melted chocolate and egg white stiffly beaten. Turn into buttered molds. Cover and steam 2 hours. Serve with chocolate sauce or whipped cream.
The ingredient list as printed is damaged — a line of type has dropped out and another has been duplicated — so shortening and sugar appear in the method but never in the list. Read it as a template rather than a set of instructions.
- The missing quantitiesThe method opens by creaming shortening, which is not in the ingredient list at all; sugar appears in neither the list nor the method, though a pudding of this kind plainly needs it. A steamed pudding of this size would typically take somewhere around 1/4 cup butter or shortening and 3/4 to 1 cup sugar. Anything you use is a reconstruction, not the original.
- "1½-1 cups flour"This is a typesetting collision, most likely 1½ cups. The duplicated sentence about sifting flour with baking powder is the same fault.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1 oz block of unsweetened baking chocolate. Two squares is 2 oz; melt over hot water and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter, or it will melt the creamed fat and slacken the mixture.
- Baking powder quantity2½ teaspoons to 1½ cups flour works out at about 1⅔ teaspoons per cup, generous by modern habit though ordinary for its own day. Expect a distinctly cakey, open crumb rather than a dense pudding.
- Molds and coveringButter individual molds or one 1-quart mold and fill no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with buttered foil or a cloth tied down; steam getting into the batter turns the surface to paste.
- Steaming setupSet the molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- TimingTwo hours suits a single large mold. Individual cups are done in 40 to 50 minutes — a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides. Overlong steaming does not ruin it but makes it heavy and damp.
- YieldAbout six servings from a quart mold. Unmold after five minutes' rest; longer and the pudding sweats and sticks.
Steamed puddings survived in American cookbooks long after most home baking moved to the oven, partly because a covered mold in a pot of simmering water is forgiving of an unreliable range, and partly because the moist heat produces a texture no baked cake gives. Chocolate versions appear frequently alongside the sale of unsweetened baking chocolate in the standard 1 oz square, a format that let recipe writers specify "two squares" without weighing anything — which may help explain why so many books of this era count chocolate rather than measuring it. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders, one of a large family of promotional cookbooks that put plain, economical recipes into millions of American kitchens in the first half of the twentieth century. The mangled ingredient list here is a reminder that these were cheaply set and cheaply printed, and that proofreading was not always the priority.