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Steamed Blueberry Pudding
Sift together one pint of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Beat two eggs, add one-third of a cupful of milk and stir it into the dry mixture, adding more milk if necessary to mix a very thick batter. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, add to the batter and beat hard for a moment. Stir in one pint of blueberries carefully picked over, washed, drained and rolled in flour. Turn into a well greased mold, steam for two hours and serve with Golden sauce.
Cream together two tablespoonfuls of butter and one cupful of powdered sugar. When very light, add gradually the well beaten yolks of two eggs and three tablespoonfuls of cream; then add the white of one egg beaten to a stiff froth.
Flavor to taste.
The pudding half is a sound steamed batter pudding and translates directly. The Golden sauce does not: it is a butter-and-sugar cream bound with raw yolks and raw white, never heated at any point, and it is served alongside a pudding that has cooled slightly rather than being cooked with it.
- Why the sauce failsTwo raw yolks and a raw white are folded into a cold butter cream and eaten uncooked. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the sauce sits at room temperature on the table while the pudding is served. Use a current recipe for a dessert sauce instead.
- A pint of flourFlour was commonly measured by volume in the period this book comes from. A pint sifted is about 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 ounces; the recipe wants a very thick batter, so add the extra milk cautiously.
- A pint of blueberriesAbout 2 cups, or 10 to 12 ounces. Rolling them in flour is the point of the step, not a flourish: it keeps them suspended instead of sinking into a purple band at the bottom of the mold.
- The moldA 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin or a straight-sided metal mold, greased and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover the top tightly with greased parchment and foil, tied or crimped, or the condensate will soak the crown of the pudding.
- Setting up the steamStand the mold on a rack in a deep pot, with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops; two hours is a long time for a pot to run dry, and cold water added mid-steam will check the rise.
- Two hours is correctThis is a dense baking-powder batter in a sealed mold, so the full time is needed. It is done when a skewer to the center comes out clean; let it stand five minutes before turning out.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Worth knowing when reading other recipes in the same volume.
- YieldServes six to eight. Steamed puddings reheat well in the mold over simmering water for 20 to 30 minutes.
Steamed puddings in a closed mold are the direct descendant of the English cloth-boiled pudding, and they survived in American cookbooks long after the pudding cloth itself was abandoned, perhaps in part because a pot of water on a stovetop gave more even, forgiving heat than a coal or wood range oven. Blueberries suggest, though they hardly prove, a northeastern setting, where lowbush berries were gathered in quantity in July and August and used in everything from griddle cakes to steamed batters; the instruction to pick them over is a reminder that they arrived with stems and leaves attached, not in clamshells. The accompanying "Golden sauce" belongs to a large family of uncooked creamed butter sauces, hard sauce among them, that appear regularly in late nineteenth-century cookbooks, in an era when the risks now associated with raw eggs were neither understood nor much feared.