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Christmas Pudding
1/2 cup Mazola 1/2 cup Karo, Blue Label 1/2 cup brown sugar 1 cup milk, sweet or sour 1 teaspoon baking soda 3 cups bread flour 1/2 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1½ teaspoons cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ginger 1/2 teaspoon cloves 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup chopped nut meats, any kind except peanuts 3/4 cup chopped dates 3/4 cup chopped figs 3/4 cup chopped raisins Combine the ingredients in the order given, mixing the fruits and nuts with the flour and cornstarch. The mixture will be quite stiff. Transfer to a mould well oiled with Mazola, cover closely and steam four hours. Serve with lemon sauce. can be prepared several weeks ahead and re-steamed for an hour.
A steamed fruit pudding built entirely from Corn Products Refining Company brands, with no suet and no eggs. It behaves like a dense spice cake rather than a traditional plum pudding, and the substitutions are straightforward.
- Use sour milk, not sweetSour milk is the safer choice -- a teaspoon of baking soda works best with acid, and the milk is the main acid on offer. Buttermilk or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar will give more lift; the recipe allows sweet milk, but expect a heavier crumb and possibly a faint soda taste.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil works. Karo Blue Label was the mild, light-coloured corn syrup, so use light corn syrup. Argo and Kingsford's are both plain cornstarch.
- Bread flourPeriod bread flour was hard-wheat white flour; all-purpose is a reasonable modern stand-in and will give a more tender pudding. The half cup of cornstarch will also soften the crumb, though in a Corn Products booklet it is there to sell cornstarch as much as anything.
- Mould sizeThe batter comes to roughly 2 quarts, so use a mould of at least 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, filled no more than three-quarters full to leave room to rise. Oil it well and cover tightly with a lid or a doubled sheet of foil tied down, or steam will condense into the pudding.
- Setting up the steamerStand the mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water coming halfway up the sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Four hours is right for this density; check the water level every hour and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- Testing itA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Let it stand ten minutes before unmoulding, or the outside will tear away.
- Keeping itKeeping -- The recipe says it can be made several weeks ahead and re-steamed for an hour. Traditional puddings keep partly on their sugar, alcohol and suet, none of which are present here in the same measure, so for a modern kitchen it is safer to refrigerate or freeze it well wrapped and re-steam for the hour the recipe allows.
- Lemon sauceNo recipe is given here. A common period version is a cornstarch-thickened sauce: about a cup of water, half a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of cornstarch cooked until clear, then finished off the heat with butter, lemon juice and zest.
- YieldEight to ten servings; it slices best the day after steaming.
The brand list — Mazola, Karo, Argo and Kingsford's in nearly every line of the ingredients — suggests this comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company; the pudding is as much an advertisement as a dish. What makes it interesting is what is missing: a British Christmas pudding is defined by suet, eggs and usually brandy, and this one has none of them. Corn oil stands in for the suet, corn syrup and brown sugar for part of the sugar, and cornstarch lightens a flour that would otherwise be leaden. The result keeps the shape of the tradition — the mould, the four hours of steam, the dates, figs and raisins, the sweet sauce — while replacing almost everything inside it.