Raisin Butterscotch Pudding: or, That got into the oven quick

Two words: "Luscious raisins."

Raisin Butterscotch Pudding 1 cup sifted flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¾ cup white sugar ⅔ cup raisins (light or dark) ½ tsp grated lemon rind ½ cup milk 1 tbsp melted butter ¾ cup brown sugar 1 tbsp lemon juice 1⅓ cups hot water Heat oven to 350°. Grease a deep 8" square or 9" round pan. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and white sugar. Mix in the raisins, making sure they're well-coated with the powder. Then stir in half of the lemon rind, milk, and melted butter. Blend well. Spread in the pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar over it. Mix the lemon juice, remaining lemon rind, and hot water. Carefully pour over the top. Bake 40-45 minutes. Serve warm. Note: Even if you usually line your cake pans with paper, don't do it with this one. The paper will float up into the sauce as it bakes. Source: Undated newspaper clipping (probably 1930s or early 1940s), Chicago area

By happy accident, our raisin pudding is egg-free. Don't you love when recipes of yore accidentally turn topical again? 

Let us pause and appreciate how amazing it is that you can turn a yellow-brown piece of ancient newspaper into something this easy to read.

This newspaper clipping comes from my great-grandmother's binder, which has been a fascinating insight into people I never met. They always look grimly tired in pictures, which made me expect a lot of recipes like "boil the spinach for forty-five minutes" or pot roasts seasoned with one-eighth teaspoon of pepper. But apparently they really liked desserts.

Getting to today's recipe, the newspaper proudly printed in large type that it is "just bursting with luscious raisins." Given how polarizing raisins are, the writers may have meant for that sentence to entice half the readers and warn off the rest. 

This recipe is undated, but everything in the book seems to be from the 1930s and 40s. Many of the desserts in the binder (and again, there are a lot of desserts) mention stretching your wartime sugar rations, which places them somewhere in the early to mid 1940s. Since this recipe uses a dizzying amount of sugar, it almost certainly came out before the food restrictions set in. 

Setting aside any speculation about this recipe's year, I'm going to guess that the newspaper printed it in the wintertime because 1) you bake it for 45 minutes and most houses didn't have air conditioning yet, and 2) it looks really rich. 

I went slightly off-book and sanded the lemon rind and sugar together between my fingers. This always helps bring out the lemon flavor. This recipe's massive mound of sugar wouldn't have fit into the flour sifter anyway, so this minor deviation both improved the taste and made this recipe less prone to spill onto the countertop.

I did not think this recipe would be so quick. Aside from a brief detour to get the rind and juice out of a lemon, it's as simple as a batch of muffins. First you mix the dry ingredients, then you mix the wet ingredients, and then you stir them all together. I should note that even though the directions don't mention this, I stirred in the raisins into the dry flour to ensure that they didn't hold together in stubborn clumps. 

Out of curiosity, I timed myself the second time I made this, starting after I had all the ingredients on the counter but before I did anything else. I didn't want to include the time spent digging through the shelves and muttering "Now where did the baking powder go?" 

The lemon is in there somewhere.

To keep things realistic, I didn't rush my way through the recipe. And because I didn't want to fudge my results, I didn't do any prep-- not even measuring the flour. I started the clock at the moment I start grating the rind off the lemon, and ended when I shut the oven on dessert. We had this baking in a smidge less than fifteen minutes. That includes digging out a correct-sized pan and also finding where the scissors went so I could open another sugar package. (Again, this recipe uses a lot of sugar.)

Look at this batter, just bursting with luscious raisins!

Also, do not use a paper pan liner in this recipe. See the note in the recipe box.

I was afraid the batter would be difficult to coax to the edges of the pan. But even though it we had to spread it a bit thin, it slid into place easily.

And now, it's time to make this pudding's magic sauce! You see, this is one of those fun recipes that completely rearranges itself as it cooks. What was on top will be on the bottom, what was beneath will be above, and we don't even have to get out second bowl. We only need to put a lot of brown sugar on top, and then pour enough hot water to almost dissolve it. The recipe doesn't say how hot the water should be, so I went with "hot enough to make you say 'ouch,' but not enough to scald your finger."

In case you didn't notice, this recipe puts equal amounts of sugar in the cake and on top of it.

In case you couldn't tell, this is very sloshy before baking. If you don't have a deep pan, the journey from countertop to oven is perilous. 

 

I had suspected that I would end up with a soggy cake, but I could see the water starting to hide under the batter after just a few minutes. I then wondered if the water would take the brown sugar to the bottom of the pan with it, or if the cake would filter it out and leave a crackly sweet crust on top.

When the timer went off, we had a triumphant dome of cake that didn't look soggy at all. You could also see what the newspaper tells us is a "delicious rich sauce of brown sugar" bubbling up from below.

In case I had any doubts about the self-forming sauce, the cake slid back and forth in the pan with every twitch of my wrists-- as if it was floating on something. 

The cake deflated and flattened back to normal within 5 minutes of de-ovening. But when I put a spatula in there, I found that it had leavened a bit. So, I could put aside my misgivings about a hardened layer of dough-paste. This recipe produced an actual cake, just like the headnote promised.

I should note that when I made this again, I did not mix the raisins with the dry ingredients. As the sauce burrowed under the cake, it took the raisins with it. The pudding still tasted as good as ever, but the free-floating raisins looked like bugs. 

The cake should be "just bursting with luscious raisins," not the sauce! 

Even if you mix the raisins with the dry ingredients, they make make their way under the cake anyway. But at least they mostly cling to the underside of the cake instead of turning into free-floating roaches. I could have tinkered with the recipe to try and make the raisins stay in the cake batter while the sauce filtered through to the other side, but I decided to just let the this pudding be what it is. After all, who wants to make a frustrating ordeal out of an easy dessert?

If we take a close look at the leftovers, you can see how the raisins aren't so much in the cake as they are attached to its underside. If you want to borrow the newspaper's phrasing, you might say that the raisins just burst out of the cake.

I love making pre-social-media recipes.

Setting aside our leftovers and how bad they look, the clipping says "You'll get an extra measure of praise from your family." I didn't record everyone's comments, but I'll let the pan speak for itself.

If you're not watching your sugar, this is really good! It reminds me of the apple-raisin man bait. It's so rich, you'd never guess it has no eggs and nearly no butter. Also, the raisins absorbed a lot of brown sugar and lemon as the sauce migrated through the cake. They became, dare I say it, luscious. Even if you hate raisins, this tastes incomplete without syrup-soaked dried fruit in it. So, pick something else to stir in. 

I'm not going to say that every recipe in my great-grandmother's binder is amazing, but it's looking really good so far.