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Half-Hour Pudding
Beat four table-spoons butter to a cream with half a pint powdered sugar; add the yolks of three eggs, beating them in thoroughly, then a rounded half pint of corn meal, and the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Mix well, and bake in a pudding, dish, well buttered. Serve hot with sauce.
A cornmeal sponge baked in a dish rather than boiled in a cloth, which is where the half hour of the title comes from. The batter is stiffer than most modern cooks expect, and that is not an error in transcription.
- Half a pintHalf a pint is one cup. So: 1 cup powdered sugar and a rounded cup of cornmeal, with 4 tablespoons (2 oz) butter and three eggs.
- "Powdered sugar"In 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not today's confectioner's sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar creamed well with the butter is the closer match.
- No liquid, by designThere is no milk or water in the list, and none is implied. The beaten whites are the only thing loosening the mixture, so expect a thick batter you spread rather than pour; work quickly once the whites go in or they collapse and the pudding bakes dense.
- Cornmeal grindUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not degerminated cornbread mix, which already carries leavening and salt. A pinch of salt is worth adding; butter of the period was usually salted.
- Oven350F. A buttered 1-quart dish, 25 to 35 minutes, until the center is set and springs back. Cornmeal keeps looking wet longer than wheat batter does, so judge by firmness rather than color.
- The hingeCream the butter and sugar properly, several minutes until pale, then beat the yolks in one at a time. With no leavening and no liquid, all the lift in this pudding is mechanical.
- SauceThe book expects a poured sweet sauce, and the pudding genuinely needs one; it is dry on its own. A hot lemon or vanilla sauce, or hard sauce that melts into it, suits the cornmeal better than fruit.
- YieldFour to six servings. Serve straight from the oven, as directed; it stiffens noticeably as it cools.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, was published at a time when a pudding might still mean a batter tied in a cloth and boiled for two or three hours over a fire that had to be watched the whole time, though baked puddings were by then well established in American cookbooks. Recipes named for their speed, this one among them, are often taken as a sign of the reliable kitchen range, which could make a baked pudding a matter of half an hour's inattention instead of an afternoon's work. Cornmeal in the mixing bowl rather than wheat flour is the other regional tell: American cookbooks of this period lean on corn wherever a batter can carry it, from Indian pudding to johnnycake.