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Nantucket Berry Pudding
One pint of grated cold boiled potatoes, one pint of flour, one-quarter of a pound of butter, one teaspoonful of salt and almost any kind of berries. Wet these with milk or water to the consistency of soft biscuit dough; roll it; spread with strawberries, raspberries, cherries or blackberries. Roll, fasten in a cloth and steam it an hour and a quarter. Serve with any sweet pudding sauce.
A steamed roly-poly built on a potato dough — the sort of pudding that turns leftover boiled potatoes into dessert. The dough carries no leavening and no sugar, so the handling of the cloth and the choice of sauce do most of the work.
- The hinge: the clothScald the pudding cloth in boiling water, wring it out, and flour the damp surface generously before laying the roll on it. A dry or unfloured cloth sticks and the pudding tears when you unwrap it. Roll loosely and tie the ends, leaving room for the dough to swell.
- MeasuresA pint here is a volume measure: two cups of grated cold potato and two cups of flour. A quarter pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz or 113 g, and should be rubbed into the flour cold.
- The potatoesBoiled the day before and thoroughly chilled, then grated on the coarse side of a box grater. Warm or freshly boiled potato turns gluey under the grater and gives a heavy dough. Floury varieties — russets — behave better than waxy ones.
- "Consistency of soft biscuit dough"Add the milk a few tablespoons at a time. Potato is already wet, so this dough takes far less liquid than a plain flour dough; expect somewhere around a half cup, and stop when it just holds together.
- SugarThere is none in the recipe, by design — the sweetness was meant to come from the sauce. Modern berries scattered plain will taste tart against an unsweetened crust, so either toss the fruit with two or three tablespoons of sugar and a spoonful of flour to catch the juice, or make sure the sauce is a properly sweet one.
- Steaming setupSuspend the wrapped roll on a rack over simmering water in a covered stockpot, or lay it in a steamer basket. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops; an hour and a quarter is right for a roll of this size.
- The sauce"Any sweet pudding sauce" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks usually covers hard sauce (butter creamed with powdered sugar and a little brandy or vanilla), a foamy egg sauce, or a thin cornstarch-thickened lemon sauce. Hard sauce melting into the hot crust is a common pairing.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Slice the roll crosswise into rounds and serve hot; it stiffens badly as it cools.
Steamed rolls of dough wrapped in a floured cloth are English in origin — the roly-poly and jam pudding of the nineteenth-century kitchen — and versions of them were made in New England as well. What makes this version distinctive is the potato in the dough. Grated cold potato stretches a scant flour supply, adds moisture, and keeps a steamed crust tender, and potato appears in pudding, bread and biscuit recipes in American cookbooks of the period. Nantucket's association with the dish is the sort of place-name attribution that American cookbooks of the period handed out freely; it signals a plain island kitchen and summer fruit rather than any documented origin. The instruction to use "almost any kind of berries" is the honest part — this is a recipe organized around whatever was ripe.