Cup Pudding
One cupful of sugar, half a cup butter, one cupful of sweet milk, three eggs, three cupfuls of flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder. Butter cups and put in each one a spoonful of jam, jelly or preserves. Then fill with the batter and steam half an hour. Serve very hot with a cold hard sauce.
A steamed sponge baked in individual moulds over a jam base — essentially a Victorian jam roly-poly reworked into single servings. The original assumes you know how to assemble a creamed batter and how to rig a steamer, so both are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: keep the cups coveredSteam condensing off the pan lid will drip into open cups and waterlog the tops. Cover each cup with buttered foil or a square of parchment tied on, and keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- "Cups" means moulds, not measuresHere the vessels are teacups or small pudding basins, roughly 6 fl oz each. Ovenproof ramekins, dariole moulds or heatproof teacups all work. Butter them well and fill only two-thirds full — this batter rises.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk was a common alternative leavener in kitchens of the period. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder. The result should be a thick dropping batter, not a pourable one.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or rum, then chilled firm. "Cold hard sauce" is the point of contrast: a spoonful set on the hot pudding so it melts down the sides. It is not a cooked sauce.
- TimingHalf an hour suits small teacup-sized moulds. Anything appreciably larger will want longer; test with a skewer through the sponge, avoiding the jam at the bottom.
- The jam layerA spoonful in the base of each buttered cup becomes the top when turned out. Use a thick preserve — a loose jelly will run into the batter and leave a soggy seam.
- YieldAbout eight to ten teacup-sized puddings. Unmould while hot; they stick badly once the sugar in the jam sets.
Steamed puddings in individual cups were a practical answer to a real problem: a large boiled pudding tied in a cloth took two or three hours and monopolised the range, while cups on a trivet over one pot of water were done in half an hour and needed no slicing. That this one uses baking powder rather than yeast or long-beaten eggs tells us only that it postdates the spread of commercial chemical leavening, which was cheap and reliable enough from roughly the 1870s onward for household books to assume a tin of it in every pantry. Hard sauce — known in Britain as brandy butter and still served with Christmas pudding — was one of several common accompaniments to a hot steamed sweet, alongside custards, sweet sauces and cream, and the contrast of cold, barely-melting butter against a scalding sponge was the whole effect the cook was aiming at.