Sultana Pudding

[igenlode]

I made a Sultana Pudding from the 1920s cookery book ("500 Cookery Hints and Recipes: This Book Will Save You Money"). Unfortunately the recipe wasn't too specific about how much liquid to add ("2 small cups of milk"), and I was a bit doubtful as to the results when it originally went into the bowl; I used an ordinary half-pint mug about three-quarters full, but this was clearly too much milk. After three and a half hours' steaming the pudding was still liquid in the middle, and microwaving it for a further three minutes didn't make a lot of difference, although the set bits around the outside were definitely tasty.

In the end I simply dished it out with a spoon and ate it liquid. It was extremely good with cold yoghurt, having a delicious caramel flavour which may have been due to the sultanas and/or to my having used evaporated milk (albeit diluted with two-thirds water). Using ground cornmeal instead of the recommended ground rice may also have had an effect — but polenta is supposed to set solid, after all!

It might be worth trying again with less runny proportions, althoug the three-hour steaming time is pretty laborious even by suet pudding standards. I suspect that as with pancakes (and bread dough) it's a case of needing to know what the intended consistency is in advance and adding sufficient liquid to attain it. And maybe worth looking up microwave equivalent cooking times for steamed puddings, as well. (The recommendation for a 2-pint Christmas pudding is apparently to microwave for 3 minutes, rest for 1 minute, and then microwave for another 3 minutes — so my guess at three minutes for a half-cooked 1–1.5 pint pudding wasn't unreasonable...)

Recipe (typical bare-bones style, with no illustrations):

Sultana Pudding.— Put into a pastry-bowl [i.e. mixing bowl] 3 tablespoonsful each of flour, sugar, ground rice and sultanas, also 1 teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda. Stir these well together. Melt 1 good tablespoonful of butter in 2 small cups of milk; gradually stir into the dry ingredients. Put into a greased basin and steam for 3 hours.

Comments

[watervole]

I remember making a steamed pudding at Guide Camp one year. It was the wettest camp I'd ever been on, and the cook patrol struggled for hours keeping the fire alight, but oh the bliss of eating that hot, filling pudding in the cowshed afterwards!

[igenlode]

The great thing about steamed puddings (and the reason why they are far older than modern bakery) is that you can make them without any oven, e.g. over a camp-fire or boiled in the cooking-pot.

I don't know if it actually uses less energy to simmer a pan of water on minimum gas for three hours as opposed to running an electric oven at 200C for an hour, but my gas bills are typically much lower than my electricity bills and electricity (i.e. trying to force current through a wire against resistance) is a notoriously inefficient method of heating...

[watervole]

Can you do steamed puddings in a hay box? (Don't know if it would be hot enough)

[igenlode]

I'm assuming you can't make a steamed pudding in a haybox because the surrounding atmosphere needs to be *above* boiling point -- one of my cookery books is pretty strict about the necessity to keep the water boiling for the entirety of the cooking time, although I imagine that's only likely to be an issue if you have a solid-fuel range.
I could only find one reference on the Web to someone who had attempted it, and in her case it wasn't a success: "Unfortunately, it would be untruthful to tell you that the pudding actually ‘cooked’ in the retained heat haybox, though it retained its heat impressively"...
https://100daysofhoney.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/the-cranberry-honey-pudding-and-the-haybox-slow-cooker/

[watervole]

Ah well, I suspect the suet probably has a critical temperature or something.

she's right about hayboxes being good for rice though. We often get rice simmering, then turn the ring off and wrap a fluffy towel over the pan. If you've measured the water properly, it give wonderful results!

Light fluffy rice, done to a turn and never burns.