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Steamed Cottage Pudding
3 tablespoons Cottolene. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs. 1 cup milk. 2 cups flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly, add yolks of eggs beaten very light. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt, add to first mixture alternately with milk; cut and fold in the stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Turn in a wellbuttered tube mold, and steam one and one-half hours. Serve with Vanilla, Strawberry, or Banana Sauce.
A plain butter-cake batter cooked by steam rather than dry heat, which gives it a moist, close crumb. Nothing here is difficult, but two details in the original need translating.
- CottoleneA brand of shortening made from cottonseed oil and beef suet, sold heavily in the 1890s and 1900s and long since discontinued. Substitute 3 tablespoons of butter or vegetable shortening; butter gives better flavor, since there is little else in the pudding to carry it.
- The moldA tube mold is a ring pan with a central chimney, which speeds heat to the middle of a dense batter. A 6-cup tube pan or metal ring mold works; butter it thoroughly and cover it tightly with foil so condensation does not drip onto the surface.
- Steaming setupSet the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching partway up the sides, lid on, water at a steady simmer. Check the water level once or twice over the hour and a half and top up with boiling water.
- TimeAn hour and a half is what the recipe calls for, though a thinner modern pan may be done sooner, so start checking earlier. A skewer in the thickest part should come out clean and the top should spring back.
- Folding the whitesThis is the hinge. The baking powder does most of the lifting, but the stiffly beaten whites keep a steamed batter from turning heavy and gluey. Fold in two additions, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- SauceThe Vanilla, Strawberry, and Banana Sauces are named as though they appear elsewhere in the book. Any warm custard sauce, a cornstarch-thickened fruit sauce, or lightly sweetened crushed berries serves the same purpose.
- YieldServes six to eight. Steamed puddings dry out quickly once cut; unmold while warm and serve the same day, or reheat slices briefly over steam.
Cottage pudding was one of the workhorse desserts of nineteenth-century American cookery: a cheap plain cake, baked or steamed, that owed much to the sauce poured over it, and its name seems to signal modesty rather than any particular place. Steaming had the practical advantage that a pudding could sit over a simmering pot while the rest of Sunday dinner claimed the oven. What dates this version is the Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-suet shortening marketed as a modern, wholesome replacement for lard; the manufacturer promoted it through recipe booklets and endorsements, and 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to that tradition of cookbooks built around a single branded fat. Reading it now, the brand name is the clearest reminder that many household cookbooks of the period were also advertising.