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Cottage Pudding
One cup of sugar, one tablespoon of butter, two eggs, one cup of milk, three cups of flour, one-half teaspoon of soda, one teaspoon of cream of tartar sifted with the flour, one teaspoon of salt. Rub butter and sugar together, beat in the yolks of the eggs, then the milk and soda, salt, and beaten whites alternately with the flour.
— Miss Mary Didymus
A plain butter-poor cake meant to be baked in a square pan and drowned in hot sauce. The receipt gives no pan, no oven and no time, all of which were assumed knowledge in a village kitchen.
- Oven and timeThe receipt specifies neither. A modern reconstruction: bake at 350F in a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan for roughly 30-35 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the sides.
- The leaveningHalf a teaspoon of soda with a teaspoon of cream of tartar is home-mixed baking powder. If you substitute commercial baking powder, use about 1.5 to 2 teaspoons and omit both. Cream of tartar reacts on contact with the wet soda, so get the batter into the pan and into the oven promptly.
- SaltA full teaspoon reads as a lot against three cups of flour. Half a teaspoon suits most modern palates.
- ButterOne tablespoon appears to be intended rather than a misprint; cottage pudding was an economy dish, and the richness was supposed to come from the sauce. The crumb will be dry and bready by cake standards. For a softer result you could raise the butter to 4 tablespoons and cut the flour to two and a half cups, but that is no longer this receipt.
- "Rub butter and sugar together"With a single tablespoon of butter there is nothing to cream in the modern sense. Work them to a damp sand, then beat in the yolks.
- The whitesBeaten whites folded in alternately with the flour add some lightness alongside the chemical leavening. Fold, do not stir, and stop while a few streaks remain.
- ServingCut warm into squares and serve with a hot sauce: lemon sauce, vanilla sauce thickened with cornstarch, or hard sauce. Serves eight to nine.
Cottage pudding is a nineteenth-century American economy dessert, and the name is often explained as a plain cake baked in a cottage, made pudding by the sauce poured over it ather than a documented origin. It appears in many community cookbooks of the era because it uses no dried fruit, no spice, barely any butter, and nothing that a household would not already have in the pantry. Its survival in a book of village receipts like this one, contributed by name, reflects how these compilations worked as a record of what a particular community actually set on the table. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing suggests a period when commercial baking powder was available but many cooks still mixed their own.