Saturday mornings R generally reserves to go to yard sales. Combing Craig’s List Friday night she divines which are worthy and shortly after the next dawn is through screeching, with long time friend and partner in crime C she blasts off in a cloud of dust. Sale-ing they call it. The whole shebang I could take or leave, but one morning I decided to go. It was a high speed tour of the back streets of Santa Fe, stopping briefly to scan the offerings for choice items and make deals and if nada climb back into the car and boogie to the next.
Nearing the end of our mad cap stomp there was one more sale in close proximity to a source of breakfast burritos. With our blood sugars perked up, we went for a quick look. Over a retaining wall and into a dirt lot squeezed in between seedy houses a few tables were set with odds and ends of old clothing, towel racks, CD’s and hard worn vacuum cleaners of questionable value. In other words, it was a pile of crap. I loitered. From a box of books a silver dome spoke to me. I picked it up, what a curious item. “What is this for?” I asked the plump bo woman running the show.
“My son used the top part for a helmet. But what it’s really for I don’t know.”
“How much would you like for it?”
“50 cents, I guess.”
Who knows, in her hesitancy, she might have come down. But 50 cents had to be more than fair, so I pulled the coins from my pocket and gave them to her. “Thanks very much. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but for 50 cents!” I said. She smiled. I couldn’t have been happier and was soon thinking about adding legs and eyeballs to it. But before sending it down a new and irreversible path I decided to do some research. It’s stamped “Wearever No.110” on the bottom. So I sent Wearever an email with photos and after some back and forth they couldn’t tell me what is was for. The pan then went on the shelf and drifted from my attention.
R and I were having tea with S and we got trading stories about bargain hunting and sale-ing and I mentioned my curious find. “I bet it’s for steaming puddings.” S said, and because she usually knows what she’s talking about, I turned to my ancient copy of The Joy Of Cooking and the World Wide Interweb for more information. Sure enough, between the quaint line drawings in the cookbook, and a couple of photos from Ebay (one just like mine the seller is asking $21.95) I confirmed the Wearever No.110 is in fact a pudding mold.
The recipes for steamed puddings in The Joy are for heart attacks on plates: a half dozen egg yokes in one; 1 cup beef suet, yes, 1 cup beef suet!!! in another, and some require steaming for up to six hours. I’ve never cooked any one thing by any means for six hours nor have I ever knowingly consumed beef suet. That’s usually reserved for putting in a net and hanging from a wintertime tree for woodpeckers. But by golly, I’m hooked. Which recipe hasn’t yet been decided and I think I’ll wait for cooler weather, but I’m going to steam a pudding… as a dessert… after something light… like a giant rib roast of some meaty beast.
Gordon Bunker
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