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Cottage Pudding
One pint flour, two teaspoonfuls cream tarter, one teaspoon soda, one tablespoonful butter, one half cup sugar, one cupful milk, one egg; butter a pan, pour it in and bake half an hour. Serve with wine or brandy sauce.
A plain one-egg cake meant to be baked quickly and drowned in sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are volumetric in the older sense and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in a pint measure: two cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz depending on how it is scooped. Spoon it into the cup and level it rather than packing, or the cake turns dry.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar to one of soda is the standard 2:1 acid-to-base ratio that predates commercial baking powder. About 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder is the usual rough equivalent, though modern powders are stronger by volume, so err on the lower side; if you keep the original pair, sift them thoroughly through the flour and get the batter into the oven at once, since the reaction begins the moment the milk goes in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified anywhere in the recipe. A moderate oven, about 350F, is the sensible modern reading, and half an hour suits that heat in an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan.
- One tablespoon of butterThis is a genuinely lean batter, closer to a rich biscuit than to a modern butter cake. Cream the butter with the sugar as far as it will go, then beat in the egg and milk. The result is dry and absorbent, which suits a cake served drowned in sauce.
- Testing for donenessThe top should spring back and a skewer come out clean. With so little fat the cake stales fast, so it is best eaten warm the day it is baked.
- Wine or brandy sauceThe period sauce is a cooked one: butter, sugar and a little flour or cornstarch thinned with boiling water, cooked until clear, then flavoured off the heat with sherry, madeira or brandy. A hard sauce of creamed butter and powdered sugar with brandy beaten in serves the same purpose. Neither is cooked long enough to drive off much alcohol, which is worth knowing if children are at the table.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a single 8-inch pan.
Cottage pudding is an American name for the plainest possible cake served as a pudding, and it is common in domestic cookbooks of the later nineteenth century because it uses no expensive ingredient in quantity: one egg, a spoonful of butter, a half cup of sugar. The interest comes from the sauce, which is why versions of it so often end with an instruction to serve it with wine, brandy, lemon or vanilla sauce. The cream of tartar and soda pairing belongs to the era when the two leavening agents were bought separately from the druggist or grocer; ready-mixed baking powders were widely available by the later nineteenth century, but many household books went on printing the older formula for decades. Contemporary anxiety about the adulteration of commercial powders is well attested, though how far any individual cook was moved by it is not something the recipe can tell us.