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Cottage Pudding
1 cupful sugar 1 egg 1 cupful milk or water 2 1/4 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful sultana raisins
Sauce (Tablespoonful Crisco cupful)
1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 cupful sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoonful flour 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 1/2 cupfuls boiling water For pudding. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, milk, vanilla, flour, baking powder, salt, and raisins. Mix well, turn into greased mold, and bake twenty-five minutes in moderate oven. Turn out and serve with sauce. This pudding may be steamed for one and a half hours. For sauce. Mix flour, sugar, and Crisco in small saucepan, then stir in egg and boiling water and boil for three minutes. Flavor with the vanilla.
This entry gives quantities only — no mixing method, pan, temperature or time, which was normal in books that assumed the cook already knew what a cottage pudding was. It is a plain butter-cake batter baked in a square pan and served warm under a sauce.
- The missing methodNo method is given. A batter of this kind would normally be handled by creaming the Crisco with the sugar, beating in the egg, then adding the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk, and adding the floured raisins and vanilla last; bake in a greased square pan in a moderate oven until a skewer comes out clean. The pan size, oven temperature and timing are a modern reconstruction, not from the book.
- Fat proportionTwo tablespoonfuls of shortening to 2 1/4 cupfuls of flour is very lean by modern cake standards — this is a cottage pudding, a much plainer thing than a layer cake. It will be dry the second day, which is part of why such puddings were generally served hot with sauce.
- CriscoStill sold and still hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though reformulated in 2007 to cut trans fat. Butter substitutes one for one and gives better flavour; the texture will be slightly less tender.
- Milk or waterThe choice is not indifferent. Milk gives a softer crumb and better browning; water was the frugal option and produces a noticeably plainer, more scone-like pudding.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins, seedless. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in so they do not sink to the bottom of the pan.
- Baking powder2 1/2 teaspoonfuls is generous but not out of line for a batter this lean and this heavy with fruit. Use fresh powder; old powder shows badly here.
- ServingCut into squares and serve warm with a hard sauce, a vanilla or lemon pudding sauce, or simply cream.
Cottage pudding is the American name for plain cake eaten hot as a pudding with sauce — the cake is the vehicle, the sauce is the point. It turns up constantly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks because it uses one egg and a spoonful or two of fat and can be assembled between other jobs. Its appearance here, with Crisco in place of butter or lard, marks the book's purpose: A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated shortening, introduced in 1911, could stand in for animal fat across a whole year of household menus.