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Cottage Pudding
1 cup sugar 1 cup sweet milk 1 egg Butter, size of a small egg 1½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt 1½ cups of any kind of fresh fruit.
Cream butter and sugar, add egg wellbeaten. Beat well. Add flour and cream of tartar previously sifted together. Dissolve the soda in the milk. Add salt. Pour milk into dish just at side. Beat well.
Into a pudding dish well buttered put a layer of batter, then a layer of fruit until all has been used up. Have batter on top. Serve with sweetened cream flavored to taste, or with cornstarch sauce.
Sauces.)
A plain batter pudding layered with fruit, printed with no oven temperature, no time, and — despite its place in the boiled puddings chapter — no instruction to steam it either. That gap is the first thing to settle.
- How to cook itThe batter is a standard cake batter in a buttered pudding dish, which points to baking; the book gives neither temperature nor time, so something in the region of 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer in the centre comes out clean, is a reasonable modern guess. If you would rather steam it, cover the dish tightly and set it in a pan of simmering water for something like 1½ hours.
- Butter, size of a small eggAround 2 tablespoons, or 1 oz, though the measure is only approximate. Eggs of the period are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large ones, so err low rather than high.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the right choice.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one teaspoon soda was the standard home-mixed baking powder before commercial tins were universal. If substituting, use about 2½ teaspoons baking powder for the 1½ cups of flour; either way the leavening is generous and the batter should go into the dish promptly.
- Pour milk into dish just at sideThe wording is obscure; most likely an instruction to add the soda-milk down the side of the bowl rather than into the middle of the batter, so it works in gradually. Either way it is not critical.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, higher in protein than most soft southern flours. Ordinary all-purpose works; do not use bread flour, which will toughen the crumb.
- The fruitA cup and a half of raw fruit releases a lot of liquid. Berries, sliced apple, rhubarb stalks or stoned plums all suit it; toss very juicy fruit with a spoonful of flour first, and expect the layers to sink somewhat into the batter.
- Cornstarch saucePresumably the cornstarch sauce from the book's sauce section, to which the recipe refers; such sauces are typically cornstarch slaked in cold water, cooked into sweetened milk or water and finished with butter and flavouring. Sweetened cream, lightly whipped and flavoured to taste, is the quicker option.
- YieldSix generous servings from a dish of about 1½ quarts, or an 8-inch square pan.
Cottage pudding is one of the most durable of North American plain desserts: a simple cake, baked or steamed, that becomes a pudding by virtue of the sauce poured over it. The name signals modesty rather than any particular place: a milk, an egg, and a little butter, at a time when richer boiled puddings ran to suet, brandy and hours over the fire. Its appearance here is characteristic of the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour. That origin may help explain the recipe's brevity, and no editor supplied a baking time.