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One-Two-Three-Four Pudding
One cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs (beaten separately), one cup sweet milk, and two tea-spoons baking-powder; flavor with nutmeg, and bake in pudding or cake mold; leave in mold till next day, when steam for three-quarters of an hour over a kettle of boiling water and serve with hot sauce. -Mrs. C. A. Malin.
A 1-2-3-4 cake batter treated as a pudding: baked in a mold, rested overnight, then steamed to serve warm with sauce. The two-stage method is the point, not a mistake.
- The hinge: bake first, steam laterThis is not a steamed pudding in the usual sense. The batter is baked through, left in its mold overnight, then steamed for 45 minutes to warm and soften it before serving. The recipe does not say why the rest is called for.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, nor a baking time. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 45 to 60 minutes, baking until a skewer comes out clean, is a reasonable modern reading; the mold size is a guess, since the recipe says only 'pudding or cake mold'.
- The ratioOne cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs is the standard 1-2-3-4 formula. Cream butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, add milk and sifted flour with the baking powder alternately, then fold in the whites last, which is what "beaten separately" means.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The word distinguishes it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were common enough in 1877 that recipes had to specify.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in three cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards, but the four beaten whites carry much of the lift. Nineteenth-century baking powders varied in strength; today's double-acting powder works as written.
- Butter and flourUse unsalted butter and add about half a teaspoon of salt if you like; period butter was commonly salted, which may be why the original calls for none. All-purpose flour works; if the flour behind this recipe was a soft winter wheat, cake flour would give a closer texture.
- Steaming setupCover the mold tightly with foil or a lid and set it on a rack over simmering water in a covered pot, or use a steamer basket. Water should not touch the mold.
- The sauce"Hot sauce" here means a sweet pudding sauce. Period pudding sauces of this kind are typically creamed butter and sugar thinned with boiling water and flavored with wine, lemon or nutmeg.
- YieldTen to twelve servings.
The 1-2-3-4 formula is often described as a mnemonic recipe, built to be remembered and recited rather than read: one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, and it is generally traced to the older pound cake ratio adjusted for volume measure and chemical leavening. It turns up under a variety of names through the second half of the nineteenth century, and its appearance here as a pudding rather than a cake shows how fluid that line was in American home cooking, where a sweet batter baked in a mold and served hot with sauce counted as pudding regardless of what it was made from. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in Ohio in 1877 and compiled from contributions by many named housekeepers, is full of such attributed recipes; Mrs. C. A. Malin's contribution is characteristic in assuming the cook already knows how to cream butter. The overnight rest before steaming may reflect a period when puddings could be made ahead and reheated, though the recipe itself says nothing of the reason.