Home › Dinner › Steamed Fruit Pudding
Steamed Fruit Pudding
3/4 cup Karo, Blue Label 1/3 cup Mazola 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and clove 1 cup sour milk 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1 egg (optional) 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's 1 cup chopped raisins Cornstarch 1/2 cup cleaned currants 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/4 cup chopped citron or 2¼ cups flour candied orange peel 1/4 cup chopped nut meats, any kind Combine the Mazola, Karo, milk and egg, beaten. Sift together the cornstarch, flour, soda, spices and salt. Add to the fruits, two extra tablespoons flour. Beat the flour into the first mixture; add the fruit. Oil a pudding mould, that holds about a quart and a half, with Mazola. Put in the mixture, cover and steam four hours. Serve with Lemon Sauce.
Juice 1/2 lemon 1 egg 3/4 cup Karo, Red Label Few grains salt Heat the Karo, pour into the egg yolk beaten light, return to the range and stir two or three minutes until thickened. Add the salt and lemon juice and pour into the beaten egg white.
A corn-products house recipe: every branded item in it is corn syrup, corn oil or cornstarch. The ingredient list has been mangled by the original two-column layout, so read it carefully before shopping.
- Reading the garbled listThe columns have run together in transcription. The actual ingredients are: 3/4 cup light corn syrup, 1/3 cup corn oil, 1 cup sour milk, 1 egg (optional), 1/4 cup cornstarch, 2 1/4 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and clove, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 cup chopped raisins, 1/2 cup currants, 1/4 cup chopped citron or candied orange peel, 1/4 cup nuts.
- Karo Blue and Red LabelKaro Blue Label and Red Label -- Karo was sold in several labelled grades; Blue Label is generally taken to be the lighter, milder syrup and Red Label the darker, stronger-flavoured one, so light corn syrup in the pudding and dark in the sauce is a reasonable modern reading. Light syrup will do in the sauce if that is what is open.
- Mazola, Argo, Kingsford'sMazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil works. Argo and Kingsford's were both cornstarch brands owned by the same company. Here the 1/4 cup of cornstarch is sifted with the flour rather than used as a thickener; cornstarch in a batter of this kind tends to soften the crumb.
- Sour milkThis means milk deliberately left to sour, which modern pasteurised milk left on the counter will not reliably reproduce. Use 1 cup buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- The flour on the fruitThe two extra tablespoons of flour tossed with the raisins, currants and citron are the point of that step: coated fruit stays suspended instead of sinking to what becomes the top of the pudding when you unmould it. Do not skip it.
- Steaming setupOil the mould, fill it no more than two-thirds so the pudding has room to rise, and cover tightly with the lid or with foil tied down. Stand it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. Four hours is correct for this volume; a skewer should come out clean.
- UnmouldingLet the pudding stand ten minutes off the heat before turning it out, or it will slump. It reheats well by steaming again for 30 to 45 minutes.
- The lemon sauce and its raw whiteThe yolk is cooked into the hot syrup, but the beaten white is only warmed by the mixture poured over it and never reaches a safe temperature. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised. The sauce makes about a cup and should be made just before serving, as the foam collapses on standing.
- YieldA quart-and-a-half mould serves six to eight.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Karo syrup, Mazola oil and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and its logic is straightforward: every place a traditional steamed pudding would call for sugar, butter or suet, a corn product stands in. Booklets like this circulated in enormous numbers in the 1910s and 1920s, and they found a particularly receptive audience during and just after the First World War, when sugar and butter were scarce and households were being urged to substitute. The dish underneath the branding is much older, a descendant of the British boiled and steamed fruit puddings that reach back through plum pudding to the seventeenth-century pudding cloth; the citron, currants and heavy hand with clove and cinnamon are all inherited from that line. What marks it as American and modern is the chemical leavening of soda against sour milk, and the fact that the egg is listed as optional.