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Raspberry Batter Pudding
1 pint milk, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoons flour, salt, and melted Crisco. Put flour and good pinch of salt into a basin, make a well in center, break in eggs, stir, gradually mixing in flour from sides, and add milk by degrees until a thick, smooth batter is formed. Now beat well 10 minutes, add remainder of milk; cover, and let stand for at least 1 hour. When ready to use, put 1 tablespoon melted Crisco into pudding dish, and while it is heating give batter another good beating. Pour into dish, and bake in quick oven for 35 minutes. Serve with raspberries and sugar.
This is a Yorkshire-pudding batter baked sweet and served with fruit. Two things carry it: a fully rested batter and a fat-slicked dish that is genuinely hot when the batter hits it.
- "Quick oven"Read this as roughly 400-425F. A batter pudding relies on steam and fast setting for its rise, so a hot oven matters; too cool and it tends to thicken rather than lift.
- Preheat the dish with the fat in itThe instruction to melt the shortening in the pudding dish "while it is heating" is the hinge of the recipe. Put the greased dish in the oven until the fat shimmers, then pour the batter in and return it immediately, avoiding opening the door during the early part of the bake.
- CriscoCrisco was new hydrogenated vegetable shortening when this book was written, and the book exists to sell it. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; beef drippings give the most traditional flavor, butter will brown too fast at this heat.
- A pint of milkTwo US cups. The batter is mixed with only part of it, beaten smooth, then loosened with the rest, a standard way to avoid lumps.
- Ten minutes of beatingWith a stand mixer or a balloon whisk, two to three minutes of vigorous work does the same job. The point is to develop the gluten and beat in air, not to log the time.
- The hour's restDo not skip it. Resting lets the flour hydrate fully and relaxes the gluten, and a rested batter rises higher and more evenly. Longer is fine; overnight in the refrigerator is better still, brought back toward room temperature before baking.
- Yield and dishA pint of milk and four tablespoons of flour make a thin batter that serves four. A 9-inch pie plate or a 9x9 baking dish gives the right depth; a deeper dish will set slowly in the middle.
- ServingThe pudding falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it to the table straight away with the raspberries and sugar. Macerating the berries with sugar for 20 minutes first draws out a little syrup, which the pudding absorbs well.
Batter pudding is the plain ancestor of Yorkshire pudding: flour, eggs, milk and salt, poured into hot fat and baked hard. In English kitchens it was long cooked under roasting meat to catch the drippings and served before it, as a cheap way to blunt appetites, but the same batter was equally at home as a sweet course under fruit and sugar, which is how it appears here. This version's use of Crisco suggests a date -- the book appears to be one of the branded cookbooks issued after Crisco's introduction in 1911, in which recipes, including a batter that traditionally called for beef fat, were reworked around the new hydrogenated shortening.