Ginger Pudding

I made a Ginger Pudding this evening from a recipe found in a little cook booklet from 1910 called "Home Helps: A Pure Food Cook Book." It was published by the makers of Cottolene, a brand of shortening produced from 1868 to the mid 20th century, so it has advertisements throughout (or rather, testimonials), as well as a majority of recipes that require some sort of shortening. Grandmother bought the booklet at an antique fair because while she was looking at it there, she opened it to the page with Ginger Pudding and thought it sounded good :) Incidentally, this recipe doesn't require shortening.

So here we go:

Ginger Pudding (by Mrs. Armstrong)

Mix together thoroughly one and one-half cups of flour, one teaspoon each of ginger and soda, one cup molasses, two-thirds cup of boiling water and one beaten egg. Steam one hour in a tube pan, and serve with either hard of liquid pudding sauce.

I mixed the dry ingredients together before I added the rest. Just seemed like good form. And I set my oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and put a jelly-roll pan of boiling water underneath my tube pan for the "steam" part. Not sure if that was what they were going for, but it worked out. I also used mini tube pans instead of one big one, and my pudding only needed to cook for 10 minutes!











I found a recipe later on in the pudding section that I think corresponds with the "pudding sauce" mentioned, though maybe Mrs. Armstrong didn't have a particular sauce in mind. At any rate, this is what I used:

Creamy Sauce and Hard Sauce (by Mrs. Lincoln)

Cream one-fourth cup of butter, add slowly one-half to one cup powdered sugar, beat in gradually two tablespoons rich fruit syrup, or wine, or any fresh fruit juice, and two to four tablespoons thick cream (whipped or not, as you have time). Serve hot by standing bowl over boiling water just before serving, and stirring only till melted and creamy. Or, serve cold; or, if for hard sauce, omit cream and pack it into dish for serving and chill till firm.

I added orange juice to mine and not as much powdered sugar as she suggests. It seems to be more of a spread than a sauce, but I suppose if you served it hot, the butter would melt, making it more of a liquid.

It was so good! The pudding and the sauce! I'm still wierded out that this cake-like thing is called a pudding, but it's not really a cake, either. It's a little more dense, and sponge-y, I guess. My only critique is that I think it needs more ginger. But it was so fun to make a recipe for the first time, from an iffy source, and have it turn out so well!

All Hail the Mighty State!

Happy Texas Independence Day!!

On this day in 1836, the Convention adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence and asserted their status as The Republic Of Texas. Yeehaw for Texas! I wanted to make Texas-shaped cookies to celebrate the holiday, but I have, most unfortunately, begun a low-carb kick-start plan this week. Boo for low carbs. More on that in a second. However, I found a fun close-second option instead of cookies: Texas-shaped cheese! :) Laugh if you must, but cheese conveniently has no carbs, and what was I to do with a Texas cookie cutter that needed some love, today of all days!? So here's the result:


Now, about this low-carb kick-start thing. If you haven't ever stopped to think about it, let me first inform you that all comfort food is super-high in carbohydrates. Milk, bread, pasta, flour, anything with creamy goodness or warm fluffiness - all out of the picture right now (I think the reason people lose weight on low-carb diets is because there is nothing good left to eat, so you just don't eat as much! :)). The kick-start part of the plan means you take low carbs to an extreme and keep your intake at a minimum with the understanding that later on, you will add more carbs back into your diet. So I am trying to stay under 20 grams of carbs a day. To put this in perspective, a slice of bread has about 15 - 18 carbs in it. Yeah. So, as I am eating lettuce wraps (in lieu of sandwiches) and celery sticks without peanut butter and roast beef without gravy or potatoes or carrots, I am consoling myself with the fact that this is a one-week experiment. I read online in different places that the first week is the hardest, so maybe I will loosen the restrictions a tad and stick with it the second week. We'll see.

In other, probably more useful news, Grandmother started reading Desiring God, by John Piper and shared a phrase with me that she liked enough to underline it in a library book! (in pencil, of course :)). He said, "I learned how to dig for gold rather than rake for leaves when I take up the Scriptures." It took a little thinking over for me to fully appreciate it. But don't you love it!?

Also in the preface (which is where the previous sentence came from) is a beautiful quotation from a Matthew Henry book.

" 'The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.' This is the great business of life--to "put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks."

Love it. I'm next in line to read it when she finishes :)