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Pudding
3 eggs. 5 tablespoons Five Roses flour 1 pint milk 1 large onion Pepper and salt to taste.
Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth. Mix the yolks with the milk, flour and condiments. Lightly mix in the whites and pour into 1 or 2 well-greased pudding tins which have been made hot. Bake 20 minutes. The pudding should not be more than ⅜ of an inch thick and should be of a nice brown colour. -Mrs. Thornton Blakely, Bloomfield, Ont.
TeleARD WHEAT [03
A plain batter pudding of the Yorkshire type, baked in shallow preheated tins rather than under a joint. The batter is thin and the pans must be hot before it goes in.
- The hinge: hot tinsGrease the tins and put them in the oven until the fat shimmers before the batter touches them. A cold tin gives a pale, heavy, sodden pudding no matter how well the batter is beaten.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. A thin batter that browns in twenty minutes needs a hot oven; modern batter puddings are usually baked around 425-450F, which is a reasonable working guess rather than the author's figure. Avoid opening the door early in the bake.
- The eggsThe method calls for separated eggs but no quantity appears in the ingredient list, so the number is genuinely unknown here. Batter puddings of the period commonly run in the range of two to four eggs to a pint of milk; treat that as a rough starting point, not as the author's figure.
- The onionA large onion is listed but no separate instruction is given for it; it may be intended under the "condiments" mixed with the yolks, milk and flour. Grated or very finely chopped and stirred in before the whites go in is the practical reading. A whole large onion to a pint of milk gives a pronounced savoury flavour.
- Pudding tinsThese are shallow metal pans, not the deep basins used for steamed puddings. Small cake tins, a shallow rectangular pan or a heavy muffin tin all work; the point is a large surface area, since the batter is only three-eighths of an inch deep.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard Canadian spring wheat flour sold for all household baking. Plain all-purpose flour is the closest modern equivalent and needs no adjustment at this proportion.
- Beating the whitesFold the stiff whites in with a light hand at the last moment and get the batter into the hot tins immediately. Standing about deflates it and the pudding will not rise in the short bake.
- Yield and servingThe recipe itself says the batter fills one or two tins. Serve it straight from the oven; a savoury batter pudding of this kind would conventionally accompany a roast, though the recipe says nothing about serving.
Batter puddings like this one are the direct descendants of the English dripping pudding, cooked beneath a roasting joint so the falling fat basted it; by the eighteenth century the version baked in its own tin was being called Yorkshire pudding, and it travelled with British settlers into Canadian home cooking. The onions turn the pudding into something closer to a savoury course in its own right. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book reflects how that book was built: the Lake of the Woods Milling Company gathered recipes from housewives across the country and printed them with their names and towns attached, so the collection reads as something other than the work of a single author.