Cherry Pudding
Two eggs, one cupful of sweet milk, three teaspoonfuls of yeast powder, flour to make a stiff batter, as many cherries or fruit of any kind, as can be stirred in. Boil or steam it two hours. Serve with fruit or hard sauce.
A plain steamed batter pudding of the kind that kept a great deal of fruit from going to waste. The original is terse even by 1900 standards, so a few of the quantities have to be read rather than measured.
- Yeast powder is baking powder"Yeast powder" was a common late-19th-century name for chemical leavening, not for baker's yeast. Three teaspoons is a lot by modern standards; two is closer to current practice for the amount of flour implied, since today's double-acting powders are stronger than many of the single-acting ones sold then.
- Working out the flourA stiff batter from 2 eggs and 1 cup of milk lands at roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour — thick enough to hold a spoon upright but still droppable, not a dough. Add the flour gradually and stop when it stops flowing.
- There is no sugar or fatAs written this is a leavened dumpling batter, sweetened entirely by the fruit and the sauce. If you want it to eat like a modern pudding, a few tablespoons of sugar and 2 to 3 tablespoons of melted butter in the batter are consistent with other recipes of the period, though the original expects the hard sauce to do that work.
- The hinge: seal the mouldFill a greased 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin or covered mould no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, and tie it down. Water getting into the mould is the commonest way this fails; the batter will absorb it and collapse into paste.
- Boil or steamSteaming means the mould sits in a pot of water reaching partway up its sides, lid on, at a bare simmer; boiling, in the older sense, means the tightly covered mould is lowered into water deep enough to cover it. Either way, top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry. Two hours is right for a full-sized pudding; a skewer should come out clean and the top should spring back.
- Cherries and other fruitPit the cherries. Fresh or thawed frozen both work, but drain thawed fruit well or the extra liquid slackens the batter. Firm fruit — apple, damson, blueberry — behaves the same way; very juicy soft fruit is the one to be cautious with.
- Hard sauceHard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm and set on the hot pudding to melt. Allow about 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sugar.
- YieldServes six to eight. Turn it out while hot; left to cool in the mould it sticks and steams itself soggy.
Steamed and boiled puddings were the workhorse sweet of the 19th-century kitchen because they needed no oven — a virtue when the range was already occupied or when summer heat made baking miserable, and the reason so many of them appear in American household books of the 1890s and 1900s. The form is inherited from English boiled puddings, which moved from the cloth-tied bag to the lidded basin over the course of the century as tinned and earthenware moulds became cheap. What marks this one as American and late is the leavening: "yeast powder" was one of several trade names for baking powder, sold in tins from the 1860s onward, and it let a cook produce a light steamed pudding in two hours rather than nursing a yeast batter or beating in eggs by the dozen. The instruction to use "fruit of any kind" is the whole point of such a recipe — a frame rather than a formula, adjusted to whatever the orchard or the market had that week.