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Cottage. Pudding
One cup sugar, half cup butter, one egg, cup sweet milk, tea spoon soda dissolved in milk, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, three cups flour, half tea-spoon extract of lemon. Sprinkle a little sugar over the top just before putting in the oven, bake in a small bread-pan, and when done cut in squares, and serve with sauce made of two table-spoons butter, cup sugar, table-spoon flour wet with a little cold water and stirred until like cream; add a pint boiling water, let boil two or three minutes, stirring all the time. After taking from the fire, add half tea-spoon extract of lemon. Nutmeg may be used in place of lemon. What is left of the pudding and sauce may be served cold for tea. - Mrs. Howard Vosbury.
A plain butter cake baked in a loaf pan, cut in squares and flooded with a hot sweet sauce — the sort of everyday pudding a nineteenth-century cook could assemble from the pantry. Nothing here is difficult; the details that need translating are the leavening, the pan and the oven.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder made in the bowl: one teaspoon soda dissolved in the milk, two teaspoons cream of tartar sifted into the flour. If you would rather use commercial baking powder, four teaspoons for three cups of flour is the equivalent. Either way, get it into the oven promptly — the acid and soda begin reacting as soon as they meet.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk that also lived in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Cup measureCup measures of this period were not standardised, but reading them as a modern 8-fluid-ounce cup works here. Three cups of flour is roughly 13-15 oz depending on how you scoop; err on the light side, as the batter should be thick but pourable.
- The panA "small bread-pan" is about an 8-by-4-inch loaf tin, which will give you a deep cake needing 45-50 minutes. An 8-inch square pan is easier to cut into squares and bakes in 30-35 minutes.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the stove had none. Bake at 350F and test with a skewer in the centre.
- The sauceSlake the flour in cold water to a smooth cream before it meets anything hot, or it will lump. A pint of boiling water to one tablespoon of flour gives a thin, pourable sauce rather than a pudding-thick one — that is intended, since it soaks into the cake.
- Flavouring lastThe lemon extract goes into the sauce off the heat. Alcohol-based extracts lose their aroma in a boiling pan, which may well be why the recipe holds it back.
- YieldAbout nine generous squares from an 8-inch pan, with sauce to spare. The note about serving the remainder cold at tea is worth taking.
Cottage pudding is the American name for the simplest possible pudding-with-sauce: a plain cake baked, cut and sauced, with no steaming, no suet and no long boiling. It belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, when chemical leavening made a quick cake practical for a weeknight, and it turns up under that name in community and household cookbooks of the period. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) was assembled from contributions by named housewives, which is why this one carries Mrs. Howard Vosbury's name — the book's value to its readers lay precisely in the fact that these were dishes someone in the neighbourhood actually made. The recipe's soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is of its moment, though the same book calls for baking powder elsewhere.