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Hasty Pudding, Baked
Mix two ounces of flour in a pint of boiling milk. Beat it over the fire till it is as stiff as batter, then pour it out, sweeten and flavour according to taste, and add an ounce of fresh butter. When cold, stir in three well-beaten eggs. Spread a little marmalade or jam at the bottom of a deep pie-dish. Pour in the mixture and bake in a good oven. Time, half an hour to bake. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
A thin flour-and-milk panada enriched with eggs and baked over jam — closer to a set custard pudding than the porridge Americans call hasty pudding. It is straightforward, but two details in the wording matter.
- The hinge: let the panada coolThe eggs go in only when the flour mixture is cold, or they scramble and the pudding bakes grainy. Spread the cooked paste in a shallow layer to cool it quickly, or cover the surface so it does not skin.
- "A good oven"For an egg-set pudding a moderate oven, in the region of 350F (180C), is the safer reading, though the phrase was not a precise instruction. Much hotter and the pudding will puff and then collapse, and the edges will curdle before the centre sets.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so a little under 2 1/2 US cups of milk. Two ounces of flour is roughly half a cup, but weighing it is more reliable.
- Sweetening and flavouringThe recipe leaves the amount to taste — two to three tablespoons of sugar suits the quantity, with grated lemon rind, a little nutmeg, or vanilla. Add the sugar while the paste is still warm so it dissolves.
- Beating it stiffLet the flour cook out over the heat for a few minutes past the point where it thickens, or the pudding tastes pasty. The recipe asks only for a paste 'as stiff as batter', not one that pulls clean from the pan.
- The jam layerA thin spread only, two or three tablespoons. A thick layer boils up through the custard and the base stays wet.
- Dish and yieldA deep pie-dish of about 1 quart capacity. Half an hour in a moderate oven should leave the centre just set -- a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean. Serves three, as stated, or four modestly.
- Probable costSixpence for the whole pudding, a reminder that this belongs to the frugal end of the book: flour and milk doing the work that cream and almonds do elsewhere.
"Hasty pudding" is the old English name for anything thickened quickly on the stove with meal and liquid — flour or oatmeal in Britain, cornmeal in North America, where the name attached itself permanently to boiled cornmeal mush. The point of the name was speed: no suet, no long boiling in a cloth, no waiting. This baked version takes the stovetop paste and turns it into something closer to a French panade-based pudding, with eggs for lift and jam beneath. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, gives a probable cost for its dishes, so a cook could see exactly what the extra eggs and butter bought her.