Golden Treasure Pudding: or, Do you trust recipes from men?

This recipe begins with a trip to the hoity-toity grocery store with a gift card in hand.

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10 1936, page 11

Golden Treasure Pudding ½ cup butter 1 cup molasses 2 eggs 1 cup finely cut figs* Grated rind of ½ lemon 1 cup sour milk† ½ tsp baking soda 2½ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 9" square pan. Combine dry ingredients, set aside. Beat butter until creamy and light. Gradually add molasses, beating the whole time. Then add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Beat the whole mixture well afterward. Add sour milk, mix well. Then mix in the figs. Sift the dry ingredients onto the mixture, then stir just until mixed. Spread into the pan and bake 1 hour. This is best if you make it at least a day before you serve it. The flavors of the spices gets a lot stronger as the cake sits overnight. Serve warm with Golden Sauce. Golden Sauce ½ cup butter ¼ cup thin cream‡ 1 cup brown sugar Juice of ½ lemon ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp nutmeg In a small saucepan, beat butter with sugar and salt. Gradually beat in cream. Add lemon juice and nutmeg. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is smooth and the sugar is dissolved. Taste to make sure no sugar grains remain. Keep refrigerated. Any leftover sauce freezes very well, and is very good on top of pound cakes, vanilla ice cream, and a lot of other things. The sauce reheats in the microwave very well. *The recipe says "finely cut," but I recommend you leave them in big pieces. The figs' flavor kind of disappears when you cut them too small. †I used sour cream. ‡I used half-and-half. B. A. Tindall, 511 Greenwood Ave, Trenton, New Jersey; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, January 10 1936, page 11

We had an interesting time at this store where they have multiple varieties of celery. Did you know there are different breeds of celery? At any rate, we came back with a few things I would never have paid for if I was actually spending my own money.

Most relevant to today's recipe, they had fresh figs! I've only ever had figs dried (or in Newtons). Apparently fresh figs don't take well to shipping, because they had them in what looked like egg cartons instead of just piled up in the bins. I had to get a few to see if I am missing anything. Don't they look pretty when you cut them open?

You know how raisins don't really taste like fresh grapes? Well, it turns out fresh figs don't taste like dried ones at all. But we're not using fresh figs today. I went to the dried fruit section and came back with these:

They look like peach pits, don't they?

That brings us to... trusting recipes from men in New Jersey! It seems the people in charge of the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange couldn't get over their astonishment that two people managed to come up with prize-winning recipes without wearing a skirt. This week's introduction to the winning recipes sounds like the writers had no idea what to make of men in the kitchen.

Every week's Recipe Exchange began with a short article about what exciting new dishes got printed this time. These introductions sound like the newspaper's sports commentators decided to write about cooking. They spent about one and a half column-feet saying things like "Mrs. Paul McAdams brings an exciting new use for this season's surplus of gooseberries with a Gooseberry Meringue Flambe. Miss Elizabeth Crane has recently returned from her travels to Amsterdam, and among her many souvenirs is a recipe for a Dutch Meat and Potato Pie. Those looking for a delicious meal that will please the whole family will be glad to try her recipe for themselves...." 

Well, this week the Exchange editors were astounded that not one but two men managed to come up with recipes good enough to print. I love how they are like "Don't worry ladies, men will never take the kitchen away from you!" Have a look for yourself:

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10 1936, page 11

We don't have a lobster budget (though I'll post that recipe at the bottom of the page for the curious), so let's see what kind of golden treasure the other man came up with! It begins with chopping figs. This is harder than you think; the figs keep sticking to the knife. But with a bit of persistence, I reduced the figs to a small pile of brown.

After the shocking price I paid for these (again, this was a gift card and not our grocery funds), I did not like seeing the figs reduced to what looked like burnt confetti. 

Also, the figs tasted rather bland. I used to sometimes buy dried figs as a little treat, but I got the golden ones. They were less leathery and tasted more... figgy. These didn't taste like much of anything.

But let us move on to ingredients I'm used to seeing in our kitchen: butter and molasses.

We are instructed to beat the butter and the molasses "until fluffy." Despite letting the beaters pound and whirl as for as long as I had the patience, that never happened. They never even mixed. As I kept having at the butter curds with the mixer, I was muttering a lot of choice words about men from New Jersey who think they can cook.

At this point, the recipe calls for sour milk. You can't get that anymore. While pasteurization has made milk-borne diseases a distant memory, it also removed the bacteria that makes milk go sour as it ages. Fortunately, we have a delicious substitute at hand:

Things started to look better when I stirred in the sour cream. I'm not sure if the sour cream actually helped mix everything together, or if it just made the molasses paler and thus better able to camouflage the butter curds. At any rate, things at least looked better.

And so, with things appearing to improve (regardless of whether they actually were), it's time to add our big splurge!

Because I didn't want any unmixable clumps of spice in this mess, I actually got out the sifter. I actually don't mind sifting flour with this little thing; it fits right  over any mixing bowl I would ever use. Before I found this sifter lying dormant in a drawer, I had to use a spaghetti strainer. This inevitably meant that unless I skipped sifting, flour got everywhere and added a lot of tedious wiping to every post-recipe cleanup.

If you find yourself making a lot of recipes that require sifting flour, I definitely suggest getting one of these gadgets. However, I will also add that when no clipboard-wielding home economics teachers are watching, sifting flour is a lot more optional than purists and pedants want to believe. But in the case of this recipe, I was a little bit worried that the flour would clump up as it landed in the runny mess. 

My clump concerns turned out to be unfounded. After stirring in the flour, we had a very thick cake batter. It sat like a fig-studded boulder in the cake pan.

I could ask what makes this a pudding and not a spice cake, but I think this recipe is a holdover from the boiled puddings of yore. It's the same kind of batter as the boiled blackberry pudding, except this time we're putting it in a cake pan. I think that after everyone got thermostatically-controlled ovens, we collectively decided that baking a cake pan of batter is a lot easier than tying the batter into a big cloth and then boiling it half a day. 

This is messy and takes a long time.

But even though the cooking method changed from boiling to baking, the name "pudding" probably stuck for a while because these tasted just like the puddings people had boiled a few generations earlier. Also, the meaning of the word "pudding," like the word "salad," is ambiguous and deeply contested anyway.

After it baked, I nipped one tiny piece out of a corner, and... well, it tasted like bland molasses. I should have left the figs in bigger pieces because their taste had all but disappeared. Well, B.A. Tindall wrote "finely cut figs" in the ingredient list, so that shortcoming is his fault. 

With that said, the texture was pretty good. I had high hopes that like Miss Leslie's gingerbread, the spices would come out and strengthen overnight. B.A. Tindall didn't write to let the Golden Treasure ripen overnight, but  I will be charitable and say that perhaps the Inquirer cut that sentence from the directions to help cram more recipes onto the page. Or maybe the newspaper staff assumed that anyone with sense would already know to let the pudding sit out overnight to improve.

The next day, we cut out a discreet piece of the pudding, and it had indeed become a lovely, delicious spice cake overnight. Even the figs tasted figgier, which I didn't expect since they didn't taste like much of anything before baking. I decided that perhaps I should go ahead and expend ingredients on the "Golden Sauce" that's meant to crown this cake.

We had to do some sleights of economization in the ingredients. First, the sauce calls for lemon juice, but not lemon rind. Not wanting to waste any lemon parts but the pith, I mixed the rind with a bit of sugar and put it away for future delights.

At some point someone will surely ask how I got that delicate lemon flavor in something I made (because people always ask questions like that), and I will proudly say "I economized!"

Getting back to the Golden Treasure Pudding and moving further down the ingredient list, brown sugar has proven very elusive for the past few weeks. Since we used up almost all of the molasses to make the pudding, I poured white sugar into the jar and mixed it with what clung to the sides. 

After a moderately quick stir, we had a golden sauce's worth of brown sugar. I don't know why brown sugar has become scarce but molasses has not, but at least we could come up with a reasonable facsimile of everything on the ingredient list.

But we haven't gotten to my favorite act of economizing yet: the cream! B.A. Tindall tells us to use "thin cream," so I figured half-and-half would do. But I didn't want to purchase even a small carton of the stuff. We're only using two tablespoons of cream in this recipe, and I knew the remainder would expire in the refrigerator before I used it. And so, I walked into the nearest Starbucks with a gift card in hand to ask if they might sell me two tablespoons of cream. This would not be the short transaction I expected.

Now as anyone who has worked retail knows, you witness all manner of human depravity. Furthermore, most of said depravity is angry at you. Apparently after dealing with rotten customers, they were not mentally prepared for something as innocent yet unexpected as "May I purchase two tablespoons of cream?"

The man behind the counter had to get his bearings and adjust himself to the absurdity of two spoons of cream. After the he got his thoughts reassembled, he asked what I wanted two spoons of cream for. I told him it was for a recipe. After this, the encounter started to make a little more sense in his head. He agreeably put a splash of cream into their smallest cup and said "I don't know how to charge you for this, so I guess just take it?" He left the end of that sentence hovering in the air like he still wasn't sure what was going on.

Having obtained all the ingredients for the sauce, Mr. B.A. Tindall's instructions make it sound like we simply need to everything together. I reread all three sentences of sauce instructions multiple times, and he doesn't tell us to do anything else. At the beginning, the sauce looked like the first step of making a cake batter.

Having gotten the butter and the sugar completely mixed, it was time for the cream. For all I know, someone working at the Starbucks near me still thinks of the person who wanted two spoons of it when he's adding a bit to someone's coffee.

If I read the instructions right, this curdled mess is ready to grace the top of a Golden Treasure Pudding.

I decided that perhaps Mr. B.A. Tindall left out a few steps in the recipe. I then guessed that said missing instructions involved the top of the stove. The sauce looked even worse after I dumped it into the saucepan.

Happily, after a bit of stovetop-stirring, the mass of ingredients actually started to look like the "Golden Sauce" promised in the recipe name. It got thick and creamy. The spice and lemon combination started to smell absolutely wonderful. I am surprised that we don't see lemon and pumpkin spice used together in a lot more recipes. The combination is just so good.

And so, we completed the Golden Treasure Pudding, with a generous spoonful of Golden Sauce. It tasted just as good as it looked. The cake was a very good, dark spice cake on its own. The lemon sauce on top was a delicious flavor contrast--- and also very good without any cake underneath it. I kept wanting to lick the spoon every time I served some of the sauce out.

With that said, I don't think anyone making this needs to insist on figs for this recipe. I think raisins or any dried fruit would work well in it. Dates would make this recipe a knockout, though maybe I'm just mindful of how much flavor chopped dates added to the date tarts. Or if you wanted to make this taste old-fashioned without a fig-grade budget, you could use prunes.

Both the cake and the sauce stored very well. I was afraid the sauce would would separate in the refrigerator and ruin itself, but even after a few days it remained perfectly fine. Furthermore, when you reheated some in the microwave, it was just as good as the first time. It didn't curdle, separate, or otherwise embarrass itself. 

I  froze the extra sauce after the pudding was gone. When I later microwaved it to pour over a bundt cake I was giving away, it reheated beautifully. I just made sure not to tell the lucky recipients that they were getting a delicious cake topped with frozen leftovers.

Like a lot of recipes snipped out of the newspapers on our screenshotting binge, the Golden Treasure Pudding tastes like something you'd have gotten from your grandmother who got it from her grandmother. (Or grandfather in this case.) It's a really good, satisfying dessert, especially in the wintertime.

In closing, here as promised is the other man-submitted recipe: Merrymount Lobster.

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10 1936, page 11

I have to respect these two men for bucking male stereotypes in print, and letting everyone reading the Philadelphia Inquirer see their names and addresses displayed over recipes for fig cake and lobster ramekins. It seems like in home cooking, men are restricted to grilling large slabs of dead animals, and maybe scrambled eggs and pancakes when Dad's making breakfast. Anything else invites other men to start chortling about "surrender your man card." 

But that is a discussion for elsewhere. I can't type a long dissertation on the systemic influence of gender roles when one of my hands contains a small plate of Golden Treasure Pudding.