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Washington Pudding
Three cups sugar, three cups flour, three cups milk, two eggs beaten very light, two tablespoons melted butter, three teaspoons paking powder, a little mace or nutmeg; butter your pudding dish and place in the bottom about two inches deep, strawberries, cherries, or any kind of fruit. Then pour the mixture on top and bake; turn out and serve with rich sauce.
A cobbler-type batter pudding: fruit on the bottom, a loose sweet batter poured over, baked and inverted. The original gives no pan size, temperature or time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- The sugar is almost certainly a misprintThe proportion of sugar is unusually high — three cups of sugar to three cups of flour, i.e. half the dry bulk — and may well be a misprint; a cook may prefer to reduce it, though nothing in the text itself confirms an error.
- "Paking powder"A typesetter's error for baking powder. Three teaspoons to three cups of flour is in line with modern practice, though older baking powders were weaker, so this is a well-leavened batter rather than an over-leavened one.
- OvenThe recipe says only "bake" and names no heat. A moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent; a deep dish of this size will likely need 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is set and springy and a skewer in the centre of the batter comes out clean.
- The dishA "pudding dish" here is a deep earthenware or metal baking dish. The batter alone comes to roughly two quarts, so with two inches of fruit beneath it and room for rising, a dish of three quarts or more is wanted.
- Turning outInverting a hot fruit pudding is the risky step. Butter the dish generously, let it stand ten minutes so the batter firms, then turn it onto a deep platter that can hold the juice. Serving it straight from the dish loses nothing but the presentation.
- FruitFresh strawberries or pitted cherries release a good deal of liquid; frozen fruit releases more still and should be thawed and drained, or the bottom layer will be soupy. Firmer fruit, such as sliced apple or rhubarb stalk, benefits from a brief pre-cooking.
- "Rich sauce"In this period that means a hard sauce (creamed butter and sugar, flavoured with vanilla or spirits) or a warm custard sauce. Either suits the pudding better than cream alone.
- YieldEnough for eight to ten servings. It is best eaten the day it is baked; the batter absorbs fruit juice overnight and turns heavy.
Puddings and cakes named for Washington were common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and the name rarely denoted a fixed recipe: it functioned as a patriotic label attached to whatever the compiler thought worth honoring, in the same way as Martha Washington cake, Washington pie and Washington cream pie. What is under the name here is an old and practical form, the batter pudding baked over fruit, the same idea as a cobbler or the English eve's pudding. Recipes of this kind earned their place in a household book because they were measured in cups rather than weights, used whatever fruit was in season or in the jar, and stretched two eggs across a table of eight. The instruction to serve with "rich sauce" and no further explanation shows what the author assumed: any cook using the book already had a hard sauce or a boiled custard in her repertoire.