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Cottage Pudding
Follow the recipe for Everyday Cake, reducing the amount of Snowdrift in the mixture one tablespoonful. Serve warm with Nutmeg, Lemon, or Fudge Sauce.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it turns the book's plain cake batter into a hot pudding by cutting the fat slightly and drowning it in sauce. Everything hinges on having the Everyday Cake formula in front of you.
- Snowdrift is shorteningSnowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and a book calling for it by name is almost certainly a manufacturer's publication. Substitute any modern solid vegetable shortening measure for measure; butter will work but browns faster and gives a firmer crumb.
- Why one tablespoon lessThe recipe does not say. A slightly leaner batter is often explained as keeping the crumb from turning greasy where the sauce meets it, but that is inference, not something the book states.
- You need the base recipeNo quantities are given here at all. Without the Everyday Cake page there is no way to reconstruct the proportions honestly, so find that recipe first rather than guessing at a generic yellow cake.
- Serve warm, cut in squaresServe warm -- The recipe says only to serve it warm with sauce. Sauce each portion as it goes to the table rather than in advance, so the cake does not sit and go sodden.
- The saucesNutmeg and lemon sauces of the era are generally flour- or cornstarch-thickened sugar syrups finished with butter and flavouring, thin enough to run into the crumb. Fudge sauce is the heavier of the three options.
- ReheatingWarm leftover portions covered for a few minutes and sauce them hot rather than serving them cold.
Cottage pudding is the frugal American answer to a steamed or boiled pudding: a plain cake, baked rather than steamed, and made into a dessert by the sauce poured over it. The name appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks — and, less certainly, English ones — as a marker of unpretentious home cooking, with no fruit, no suet and no long boiling, and it survived deep into the twentieth century in school and institutional kitchens for exactly that reason. Its presence here, as a two-line variation on another recipe, tells you what kind of book this is: a manufacturer's pamphlet built to show that one tin of shortening could stand in for butter and lard across the whole dessert repertoire. Snowdrift was among the new vegetable shortenings that reshaped American baking in the early 1900s, and cookbooks like this one were one of the ways cooks were taught to use them.