Shaking Quaker Pudding

I don’t know if you noticed the photograph of old recipes on the kitchen table in the Ropes Mansion in my last post: no worries, I’ll put it in this one. At the bottom of one piece of paper is the beginning of a recipe for “Shaking Quaker Pudding”–only the beginning, unfortunately, which set me off on a strange quest. As a descendant of a Shaker (I know–Shakers were/are celibate–how can they have descendants? Well, after he had had his family, my great-great-great? grandfather Calver sold everything at auction over in England and departed for New Lebanon, New York in the nineteenth century: we have the auction poster to prove it) I knew immediately that the reference was to the Shakers, who have developed quite a foodie reputation over the past few years, in addition to their long-established renown for furniture, seeds and herbal tonics. I thought it would be easy to find the rest of the recipe but when I first googled “Shaker Pudding” I came up with Jello Shake-a-Pudding! I can’t imagine anything less Shaker-ish, really. Then I found a British pudding called “Shaker Quaker” Pudding, but it did not start out with the “stone raisins”  line of the Ropes recipe. Finally I found the entire Shaking Quaker recipe, in Mrs. J. Chadwick’s Home Cookery: A Collection of Tried Receipts, Both Foreign and Domestic (1853). So here it is:

and bake for half an hour!

The digitized version of Mrs. Chadwick’s cookbook cut off the recipe as well, but fortunately I found another source. All this work for a raisin custard bread pudding (the Shaker Quaker puddings seem to omit the bread) which I doubt I will ever make (unless I add lots of rum or bourbon). However, I did discover several recipes that did tempt me, especially “Shaker Lemon Pie”, apparently a favorite of Martha Stewart’s. And the pudding shaker.

The delicious-looking Shaker Lemon Pie–made with thin lemon slices–is from the blog Love & Flour.