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West Riding Pudding
Beat two ounces of butter to a cream, add two eggs, and two ounces of sugar, a little at a time, and beat for a few minutes. Stir four ounces of flour in with half a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and a few drops of essence of lemon. Put some red currant or raspberry jam at the bottom of a shallow pie-dish, then decorate the edge with leaves of pastry. Nearly fill with the mixture, and bake at a moderate heat. Serve either hot or cold. The dish may be lined with pastry, if preferred.
A jam-bottomed baked sponge pudding in the plainest Victorian idiom. The quantities are a classic English ratio — 2 oz butter, 2 oz sugar, 4 oz flour, 2 eggs — and they scale up cleanly if you want a larger dish.
- The weights in cups2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons (55 g); 2 oz sugar is a generous 1/4 cup (55 g); 4 oz flour is a scant cup (115 g). Two eggs against only 2 oz of butter and sugar gives a loose, almost batter-like mixture rather than a stiff creamed sponge, which is correct here.
- "A moderate heat"No temperature is given; a moderate oven is conventionally taken as about 350F / 175C. In a shallow pie dish the pudding wants roughly 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is set and springs back and a skewer comes out clean of batter.
- Essence of lemonModern lemon extract, or the finely grated zest of half a lemon. "A few drops" of Victorian essence was potent; start with 1/4 teaspoon of extract and no more.
- The pastry leavesCut them from shortcrust or puff trimmings, dampen the rim of the dish so they stick, and brush with beaten egg or milk. They brown faster than the sponge, so check at 20 minutes and lay a strip of foil over the rim if they are colouring too hard.
- Keeping the jam downSpread the jam in an even layer and spoon the batter over it gently, working from the centre out — a thin loose batter will otherwise plough through and the jam will ride up the sides and catch. Stand the dish on a baking sheet to catch anything that does boil over.
- "Nearly fill"Leave a good half inch of headroom. The mixture rises appreciably and then settles as it cools.
- If you line the dishThe optional pastry lining is worth blind-baking for 10 minutes before the jam goes in, or the wet jam layer will leave the base soft.
- YieldA 1 to 1.5 pint shallow dish; four helpings, five at a stretch. Good hot with custard, and firm enough to cut cleanly when cold.
The West Riding was the largest of Yorkshire's three ridings, covering the west and south of the county — Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Sheffield — and puddings of this kind carried its name into the general English repertoire in the later nineteenth century, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and versions of the same jam-and-sponge idea appear under many regional labels. What distinguishes it is that it is baked rather than boiled in a cloth or basin: as closed ranges and reliable ovens spread through middle-class kitchens in the 1870s and 1880s, the shallow pie-dish pudding took its place alongside the suet-and-cloth tradition, which remained standard well into the twentieth century, and books like Cassell's carry a good number of them. The pastry leaves round the rim and the optional lining are the frugal habit of a household that always had trimmings to use up, and the instruction to serve it hot or cold marks it as a dish expected to reappear at a second meal.