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Fruit Pudding (No. 2)
Fill a medium sized pudding dish full of any raw fruit. Sprinkle slightly with sugar and spread on top the following: 1 egg well beaten,½ cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter,½ cup milk, 1 cup Five Roses flour. Bake in moderate oven. 1 egg
A cobbler in all but name: fruit on the bottom, a thin batter poured over, baked until set. The original's brevity hides two gaps worth filling before you start.
- No leavening is listedOne cup of flour with one egg, half a cup of milk and a tablespoon of butter will bake into a dense, close-grained lid unless something lifts it. Similar batter puddings of the period often included a teaspoon or so of baking powder, and the trailing stray "1 egg" at the end of the entry suggests the text may have been garbled in setting; whether the omission is an error or deliberate cannot be established.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour milled by Lake of the Woods. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; the batter is forgiving enough that bread flour would also work, if slightly chewier.
- Moderate oven350F. Give it 35 to 45 minutes, until the topping is browned and firm in the centre and the fruit juices bubble up at the edges.
- "Medium sized pudding dish"Roughly a 1½-quart deep baking dish, about 8 inches across. The batter is only enough to cover that surface thinly, so a wider dish leaves bare patches of fruit.
- Choice of fruit"Any raw fruit" means fruit that softens and releases juice in 40 minutes: rhubarb, sliced apple, plums, berries, halved apricots. Sprinkle more than "slightly" with sugar for rhubarb or sour cherries, since the batter carries only half a cup for the whole dish.
- ConsistencyBeat the egg, sugar and butter together, add the milk, then the flour last; the result should be a thick pourable batter, closer to muffin batter than cake. Spoon it over the fruit and spread it rather than expecting it to level itself.
- YieldFour to six servings. Serve warm with cream or a thin custard.
The Five Roses Cook Book was produced by Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to purchasers of its flour; recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, which is why so many entries are short, unpolished and numbered (No. 1, No. 2) where several cooks sent in versions of the same dish. This one belongs to a family of batter-over-fruit puddings that runs through nineteenth-century English and North American cookery and survives as cobbler — the common idea being that a small amount of cheap batter stretches whatever fruit the garden has produced into a hot dessert for a family.