To a pint and a gill of strained squash, put three gills of sugar, three eggs, two crackers, pounded and sifted (or four eggs without the crackers), a teaspoonful of salt, one nutmeg, a dessert spoonful of powdered cinnamon, or some essence of lemon, a teaspoonful of ginger, and a table-spoonful of butter, melted in a quart of milk. Boil the milk. To mix it, stir the spice and salt into the strained squash first, then add the cracker, and sugar, and when these are mixed, pour in half the milk, and when this is well stirred, add the remainder, and lastly the eggs, which should be thoroughly beaten. If you make up two quarts of milk, use five eggs, and five pounded crackers, and double the other ingredients.
Another.
Six eggs, eight table-spoonfuls of strained squash, one quart of boiled milk, a little salt, two table-spoonfuls of rose-water, a lemon (juice and rind), sugar to your taste, a spoonful of butter melted. Grate nutmeg over the top. Mix the ingredients as directed in the last receipt. The mode of making pumpkin puddings or pies, may be almost endlessly varied. They are very good without eggs, substituting a little more pumpkin and three crackers pounded and sifted, to a quart of milk; omitting rose-water, use cinnamon and a very little ginger. When you have only one or two eggs to a quart, use two crackers.
Puffs.
Make a rich paste of a quart of flour; after you have rubbed in part of the butter, cut the white of an egg to a stiff froth; reserve half a spoonful of it, and stir the rest, and the water into the flour with a knife; then proceed to roll in the remainder of the butter in the usual way. Cut rounds in the paste of the size you wish to have them, and twice as many as you intend to have of puffs. Then cut out of half of them, a small round in the centre, so as to leave a circular rim of crust. Take up these rims with a wide-bladed knife, and lay them upon the large rounds so as to form a raised edge, and with the knife lay them, thus prepared, on tin sheets, or a nice sheet-iron pan. Take a feather, and lightly brush the edges with a little of the reserved white of egg. This will make them brown handsomely. Bake them in a quick oven. Bake also the small rounds which were cut out from the rims. When all are baked, put raspberry jam, quince, currant, or lemon jelly in the puffs and lay the small rounds over it. Some people like them best, without covering the jelly.
To make lemon jelly for the purpose, beat one egg and a cup of sugar together; when well mixed, add the juice of a lemon, and then two table-spoonfuls of cold water. Put the mixture in a shallow dish, set it on the stove, and stir it steadily, until it thickens, then take it off immediately. Be careful it does not boil. When it is cool, put it into the puffs.
DIRECTIONS ABOUT PUDDINGS.
The eggs for all sorts of puddings in which they are used, should be well beaten, and then strained. If hot milk is used, the eggs should be added after all the other ingredients. Milk for pumpkin, squash, cocoanut, tapioca, ground rice, sago, arrow-root, and sweet potato puddings, should be boiled; for bread and plum puddings also, unless the bread is soaked in milk over night. When suet is used in puddings, it should be chopped fine as possible.
In making batter puddings, but a small portion of the milk should be put to the flour at first, as it will be difficult to stir out the little lumps, if the whole quantity is mixed together at once. After the flour is stirred smooth, in a part of the milk, add the eggs not beaten, and beat the mixture well; then add the remainder of the milk, and stir all together till equally mixed. A flour pudding is much lighter, when the materials are all beaten together, than if the eggs are done separately. When berries or cherries are to be used, put them in last. A batter pudding, with berries, requires at least a third more flour than one without. For cherry pudding but a small addition of flour is needed.