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Pan-Dowdy Pudding
One tablespoon of lard, two of sugar, and a little salt rubbed all together, then add one cup of flour with one and one-half teaspoons of baking powder sifted through it. Rub this in sugar and lard, then add one egg well beaten, and three-fourths cup of milk. Lastly add a good half cup of flour. Then use any kind of berries, preferably black raspberries canned. Cover the bottom of dish about one-half inch thick with berries and plenty of juice. Then drop this mixture over the berries and bake. When done turn bottom side up on a dish, spread over the berries thickly a sauce of butter and sugar flavored with a little nutmeg, and serve while hot.
— Mrs. E. J. Ford
A cobbler-style drop batter baked over fruit and inverted, with a butter-and-sugar sauce spread on afterward. The original gives no oven temperature, dish size, or time, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A batter of this richness over juicy fruit wants 375F; expect 30 to 40 minutes, until the top is set and a skewer in the centre comes out clean. Bake on a sheet pan, since the juice will bubble over.
- Dish sizeA 2-quart baking dish, roughly 8 inches square or a deep 9-inch pie plate, gives the half-inch fruit layer the recipe asks for with room for the batter. Around 2 1/2 to 3 cups of berries with their juice will do it.
- The lardOne tablespoon of lard is the whole fat in the batter, and it should be soft, not melted, so it creams with the sugar. Butter or shortening substitutes directly, though lard gives the shorter, more tender crumb the receipt is after.
- Flour in two stagesThe cup of flour carries the baking powder; the "good half cup" added last is there to stiffen the batter so it can be dropped in spoonfuls rather than poured. Add it gradually and stop when the batter holds its shape on the spoon.
- "A little salt"Read this as a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Canned black raspberriesHome-canned fruit in syrup is what Mrs. Ford had in mind, and the juice matters as much as the berries. Frozen berries thawed with their liquid, or jarred fruit in light syrup, work; fresh berries need about 1/3 cup sugar and a splash of water to make enough juice.
- Turning it outThis is the hinge. Loosen the edges, invert onto a rimmed platter while the pudding is hot, and do it in one motion. Left to cool, the fruit sets to the dish and the cake tears.
- The sauceButter and sugar creamed with nutmeg is a hard sauce: about 4 tablespoons softened butter to 1/2 cup sugar, beaten pale. It is spread on rather than poured, and melts into the hot fruit.
- YieldSix modest servings. It does not keep or reheat well; the point of the dish is eating it straight from the oven.
Pandowdy belongs to the family of New England and Mid-Atlantic fruit puddings that also gave us cobbler, grunt and slump, all of them ways of stretching a small quantity of flour, fat and sugar over a large quantity of fruit. The name is generally traced to the dish's plain, "dowdy" appearance, and in many older versions the crust is deliberately broken up and pushed down into the juice partway through baking, a step called dowdying; here the effect is achieved instead by inverting the whole thing so the syrupy fruit ends up on top. That this version calls for canned black raspberries as the preferred fruit makes it a pudding available in February as readily as July. Contributed receipts like Mrs. Ford's were the backbone of community cookbooks, which assumed a cook who needed only the proportions.