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Sponge Pudding (Four eggs one-half cup flour)
Four eggs, one-half cup flour, one pint milk, butter size of an egg, one-half cup of sugar. Scald milk in double boiler. Mix flour with a little cold milk, stir into hot milk and cook well. Let it cool. Add butter and sugar and eggs (beaten separately) and bake one hour in dish of hot water. Flavor slightly, serve with wine sauce.
— Mrs. Wm. H. Van Orden
A baked custard-and-panada pudding, closer to a soufflé than to anything cake-like. The hinge is the eggs: yolks beaten into the cooled paste, whites whipped and folded in last, which is what gives the pudding its sponge.
- Butter size of an eggConventionally taken as about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Comparison measures of this kind are common in nineteenth-century receipts, where volume and hand-measure were used alongside weight.
- "Beaten separately"This means yolks and whites, not one egg at a time. Beat the yolks into the cooled flour-and-milk base with the sugar, whip the whites to soft peaks, and fold them in at the very end. Stirring the whites in flat will give you a dense baked custard.
- Cool the base properlyThe scalded milk thickened with flour must be lukewarm or cooler before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Spreading it in a shallow bowl speeds this up.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the book assumes a range cook's judgement. A water bath pudding of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F. The hour is realistic at that heat; test with a knife just off centre.
- The dish of hot waterA bain-marie. Set the buttered pudding dish in a roasting pan and pour boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Add the water after the pan is in the oven to avoid slopping into the batter.
- "Flavor slightly"Vanilla extract, a little grated lemon rind, or nutmeg. A teaspoon of vanilla is enough for a pint of milk; the point of a sponge pudding is that the sauce carries the flavour.
- Wine sauceThe period standard is butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira beaten warm, sometimes thickened with a little cornstarch or an egg yolk. It is not cooked to burn off the alcohol, so it is worth knowing that before serving it to children.
- YieldRoughly a quart of mixture before the whites are folded in, serving about six. Serve promptly from the oven, as a pudding lightened this way will settle as it cools.
Sponge puddings sit at the point where the English boiled pudding tradition met French souffle technique, and the flour-thickened milk base here is a panada — the same starch paste that stiffens a souffle and keeps the whipped whites from collapsing entirely. Baking in a dish of hot water was standard for egg-heavy puddings before thermostats, since the water cannot exceed boiling and so protects the custard from a fierce range oven. The recipe is signed by a named local woman, in the manner of the community fundraising cookbooks that American churches and clubs produced in large numbers, each contributor giving a dish she was known for, with the brevity of someone writing for neighbours who already knew what a wine sauce was and how hot to keep the oven.