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Batter Pudding
4 ounces Five Roses flour 2 drachms bicarbonate of soda 1 egg A little sugar Milk to make thin batter.
Mix to a thin batter and bake in a well-buttered tin in a brisk oven for ½ hour.
Strew a few currants in the bottom of the tin.
A four-ingredient batter pudding of the Yorkshire type, filed under boiled puddings but plainly baked. The measurements are terse and one of them is out of modern proportion, so read the soda note first.
- The soda is far too muchTwo drachms is roughly 3.5 g of bicarbonate for 113 g of flour — several times what a batter this size needs, and there is no acid (buttermilk, cream of tartar, molasses) to neutralise it. Used as written it tastes metallic and soapy. A rounded teaspoon of baking powder, or 1/4 teaspoon of soda with soured milk, is the working equivalent.
- "Brisk oven"Conventionally reckoned at about 400–425F. A batter pudding needs the high heat to set the outside quickly and pull steam through the middle; in a merely moderate oven it is apt to stay flat and heavy.
- 4 ounces of flourWeight, not volume — about 113 g, or a scant cup measured by dip and sweep. Weighing matters here because the whole recipe hangs on the batter being thin.
- "Thin batter"Aim for the consistency of unwhipped cream — roughly 3/4 cup of milk to this quantity of flour and one egg. It should coat a spoon and run off freely. Let it stand 20–30 minutes so the flour hydrates.
- Butter and heat the tinButter the tin well -- the recipe asks for a well-buttered tin but does not direct preheating it; if you do heat the tin first, watch the butter, which scorches at this heat.
- CurrantsDried currants (Zante), not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Two or three tablespoons is enough; scattered in the tin they sit under the pudding and caramelise.
- Timing and donenessHalf an hour suits a shallow tin of about 8 inches. It is done when well risen, dry in the centre and coloured at the edges — test with a skewer rather than the clock, and serve straight from the oven before it sinks.
- YieldServes two, three at a stretch, with sugar, jam or a lemon sauce. Double it for a family and use a larger tin rather than a deeper one.
Batter pudding is one of the plainest members of the English pudding family — flour, egg and milk beaten thin and cooked hard, the same mixture that becomes Yorkshire pudding when it is baked under a joint and toad-in-the-hole when sausages are dropped into it. Sweetened and studded with currants it belonged to the cheap end of the dinner table, made from a handful of pantry staples and stretched with milk. Its appearance in a Canadian flour-milling book, giving its soda in apothecaries' drachms and directing the cook to bake rather than boil, suggests a contribution copied out of an older British source rather than written fresh for the collection; promotional cookbooks of this kind drew heavily on readers' handwritten submissions, and the seams show.