Home › Supper › Cracker or Cake Crumb Pudding
Cracker or Cake Crumb Pudding
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 3 cups graham cracker or cake crumbs 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Pour the Mazola in a mixing bowl, add the Karo and egg, well beaten and stir in the milk, vanilla, cornstarch and crumbs, with the baking powder and salt. Transfer to a mould rubbed with Mazola, cover closely and steam for an hour and three quarters. Serve with Lemon Sauce or Fluffy Fruit Sauce.
A steamed crumb pudding from a Corn Products Refining Company promotional booklet, which means every branded ingredient in it is one of theirs. The ingredient list as printed has lost several of its quantities, so read the notes below before starting.
- The list is incompleteOnly the vanilla, crumbs, baking powder and cornstarch carry amounts. The Mazola, Karo, egg, milk and salt appear in the method with no measures at all, and there is no honest way to recover them from the page. Standard steamed crumb puddings of the period run to roughly 1/2 cup oil, 1/2 cup syrup, 1 egg, 1 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt for 3 cups of crumbs, but that is inference, not the book's own figure.
- Brand namesMazola is corn oil, Karo is corn syrup (light, unless a recipe says otherwise), and Argo and Kingsford's are both cornstarch. Any equivalent will do; the branding is advertising, not chemistry.
- "1/2 teaspoons baking powder"A typo for 1/2 teaspoon, most likely, though 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 teaspoons would be more usual for this quantity of crumbs. Treat it as ambiguous and lean toward 1 1/2 teaspoons if you want the pudding to lift at all.
- Steaming, not bakingThe mould goes into a covered pot on a rack with boiling water partway up its sides, not into the oven. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops; if it boils dry the mould scorches and the pudding sets hard against the metal.
- Cover it closelyThis is the hinge. Condensation dripping into an uncovered mould turns the top to paste. Foil crimped tight over the rim, or a lid plus foil, keeps the batter dry while the steam does its work.
- Fill two-thirdsThe book gives no mould size. With 3 cups of crumbs plus the liquids the batter runs to something over a quart, so a mould of about 2 quarts is needed if it is to be only two-thirds full. Crumb puddings rise modestly but they do rise, and a full mould pushes its lid off mid-steam.
- The full hour and three quartersUnlike many old timings, this one is not inflated. Steam penetrates slowly and the pudding needs the time to set through; test with a skewer at the centre before unmoulding, and let it stand five minutes in the mould first.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings. Serve warm, turned out onto a plate, with one of the two sauces the recipe names.
Booklets like this one were published by manufacturers to teach cooks new uses for a single line of products, and the giveaway here is that a short pudding recipe manages to name four proprietary goods: corn oil, corn syrup and cornstarch twice over. Corn Products Refining Company introduced Mazola oil in the early twentieth century and spent decades arguing, in print like this, that it could stand in for butter and lard in ordinary baking -- which is why a pudding that a Victorian cook would have made with suet and sugar appears here made with oil and glucose syrup. The dish itself belongs to a much older and thriftier tradition: steamed puddings built on stale bread, cracker or cake crumbs were a standard way of using up what the household already had, and the boiled or steamed mould was the natural technique in kitchens where oven space was scarce or unreliable.