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Baltimore Pudding
One cupful sweet milk, two cups flour, one egg, three teaspoonfuls baking powder, one tablespoon sugar, two tablespoonfuls melted butter, flavor with vanilla or lemon, bake half an hour. Brandy sauce.
This is a plain batter pudding of the late nineteenth-century sort — closer to a sweetened biscuit-cake than to a custard — and the original assumes you know your own oven and your own sauce. Two things are missing and need supplying: a temperature and a pan.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because the writer expected a cook to judge her range. Bake at 350F for the stated half hour; a 1-quart to 1 1/2-quart dish or an 8-inch round pan is the right size for this quantity.
- Sweet milk"Sweet milk" means ordinary fresh milk, specified only to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened baking. Whole milk is the closest match.
- SaltNone is called for, and the butter of the period was usually salted. With unsalted butter add about 1/4 teaspoon salt or the pudding tastes flat.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour works out to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup, generous by modern practice but within the usual range, and it needs no adjustment. Old baking powder is the usual cause of a heavy result; mix and get it into the oven promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of milk to two cups of flour gives a thick drop batter, not a pourable one. Spread it into the dish; it will not level itself.
- Testing for donenessHalf an hour is about right at 350F, but judge by a skewer coming out clean and the top springing back. An overbaked batter pudding dries quickly since there is only one egg and two tablespoons of butter holding it together.
- Brandy sauceThe recipe names the sauce and leaves it at that. A brandy sauce of this period could be either a hard sauce — butter and sugar creamed with brandy — or a thin poured sauce, a cooked sugar-and-butter sauce flavoured with brandy. Either wants to be sweeter and stronger than seems reasonable, because the pudding itself is barely sweet — one tablespoon of sugar in the whole dish.
- YieldServes six modestly, and it is best warm on the day it is made.
Batter puddings like this one belong to the period when chemical leaveners had become cheap and reliable enough to replace yeast and beaten eggs in everyday baking, and American cookbooks filled up with quick puddings. The dish is defined less by its batter — which is nearly a plain cake — than by the sauce, and the near-total absence of sugar in the pudding proper points the same way: sweetness was the sauce's job. Place names attached to puddings in this period were often a nod to fashion or to a contributor's home town rather than a documented regional origin, and there is nothing in the recipe itself to connect it to Baltimore. The brandy belongs to the older English tradition of spirituous pudding sauces, which persisted in American home cooking after the puddings themselves had gone plain.