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Molasses Sponge Pudding
2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 cupful Crisco ½ cupful molasses 1 egg 1 tablespoonful breadcrumbs 3/4 cupful milk ½ teaspoonful salt
The book gives quantities only, with no method — typical of the compressed style used through the pudding chapter, where the reader was expected to know the standard procedure. Here is what the list implies and where it needs interpretation.
- The missing methodCream the Crisco, beat in molasses and egg, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Grease the mold with Crisco; the single tablespoon of breadcrumbs is most plausibly for dusting the mold rather than enriching the batter, though the list gives no indication either way.
- Steam or bakeA sponge pudding of this period was usually steamed in a covered mold set in simmering water; allow something like 1½ to 2 hours for this quantity. The list gives no method or oven term, so any baking temperature is a modern reconstruction rather than the book's instruction.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, measured at 1/2 cup. Butter can stand in, and gives more flavor, but it carries water as well as fat, so the swap is not exact and the crumb will be slightly less tender than the book intends.
- Soda and molassesThe half teaspoon of baking soda is there to neutralize the acid in the molasses and is the only leavening besides the egg. Mix and get the pudding into the mold promptly; the reaction begins as soon as the two meet.
- The salt looks wrong1½ teaspoonfuls of salt to two cups of flour is high for a sweet pudding and may well be a misprint for 1/2 teaspoonful. Reduce to 1/2 teaspoon unless you want an aggressively savory edge; note that this is a reading of the figure, not a correction the book supports.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of 1913. A cup and a half is a great deal of liquid sweetener, so the batter will be dark and slack.
- Yield and servingFills a 1½-quart mold and serves six to eight. Steamed molasses puddings are served hot with a hard sauce, lemon sauce or plain cream.
The Story of Crisco was published in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the recipes in it — written by Marion Harris Neil — exist to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard across the whole of the domestic repertoire. A molasses sponge pudding was a shrewd inclusion: steamed and baked molasses puddings descend from the English boiled-pudding tradition and were thoroughly familiar in American kitchens, so a housewife could judge the substitute against a dish she already knew by heart. Molasses remained in regular use in some parts of the country, often in company with ginger and a pinch of soda. The terse ingredient list, with no method at all, assumes a cook who had made a dozen such puddings and needed only the proportions.