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Cottage Pudding
4 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 cup of sugar, 2 eggs, 3/4 a cup of milk. Two level teaspoonfuls of baking powder, one and three-quarters cups of sifted flour or enough to make mixture stiff enough to drop from the spoon. Bake in buttered gem pans in moderately hot oven twenty-three or twenty-five minutes. If the cake springs back after pressing a finger on the top, it shows that it is baked enough. To make a cocoa cottage pudding, add to the above rule six level tablespoonfuls of Baker's Breakfast Cocoa. Serve with a vanilla sauce.
A plain butter cake batter baked in muffin cups and served warm under sauce. The original assumes you know the creaming method, so the order of work is left to you.
- Gem pansGem pans are the period's muffin pans, usually cast iron; a standard muffin tin is the nearest equivalent, though gem cups are often a little smaller. Butter them well, as this batter has no other release help.
- Moderately hot ovenRead that as 375F. Twenty-three to twenty-five minutes suits muffin-sized portions; a single 8-inch square pan of the same batter needs closer to 30-35 minutes.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the flour and baking powder sifted together. Stop as soon as the flour disappears.
- 4 level tablespoonfuls of butterHalf a stick, 2 oz, 57 g. This is a lean cake by modern standards, which suits it to being eaten under a sauce.
- FlourThe 1-3/4 cups is a guide rather than an exact figure: the instruction "stiff enough to drop from the spoon" governs. Sift it, add it gradually, and judge by whether the batter falls thickly from the spoon rather than pouring.
- The cocoa versionBreakfast Cocoa is unsweetened natural cocoa, not Dutch-process and not a drink mix. Six tablespoons of dry powder absorbs a good deal of liquid, so expect to add a few spoonfuls more milk to bring the batter back to dropping consistency.
- DonenessThe finger test given here is sound and better than a toothpick for a cake this small; the top should spring back with no dent left.
- Vanilla sauceMost likely a stirred cornstarch sauce or a thin custard, sweetened and flavored with vanilla, served warm and poured over. Anything of that kind works; the cake is plain on its own.
- YieldAbout 12 muffin-sized puddings, serving six to eight with sauce. Best warm, the day they are baked.
Cottage pudding is one of the standard American plain-cake desserts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a modest butter cake, baked in whatever pan was at hand, made into a pudding by the sauce poured over it. The name is often said to signal economy rather than any particular place, in the same family as cottage cheese and cottage loaf. Its appearance here, with six tablespoons of Baker's Breakfast Cocoa offered as a variation, suggests how the Walter Baker company's recipe booklets may have worked: take a dish every housekeeper already made, and demonstrate that a few spoonfuls of the company's cocoa would turn it into something new. Breakfast Cocoa was a general trade term, used by several makers, for an unsweetened cocoa sold as a wholesome beverage, and the booklets steadily pushed it toward baking as well.