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Batter Pudding
This is an old-fashioned foundation batter pudding which may be used plain with a fresh or stewed fruit sauce or the fruit cooked with the pudding. The pudding may be baked in a buttered dish for thirty-five minutes or boiled in a close-covered mould in rapidly boiling water for two hours.
To a pint of cold milk allow two eggs, a little salt, and four tablespoons of flour. Sufficient for four people.
A four-ingredient foundation batter that behaves more like a baked custard than a cake. The proportions are very lean by modern standards, so know what to expect before you commit a mould to two hours of boiling.
- The batter is deliberately thinThe batter is thin -- Four tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk is about 1 oz flour to 16 fl oz liquid, thinner than a Yorkshire or clafoutis batter. Baked, it sets soft and custardy with a browned skin; it will not slice like cake.
- PintAn American pint is 16 fl oz (2 cups). If you are working from an English edition of a similar recipe, the imperial pint is 20 fl oz and the batter is thinner still.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Thirty-five minutes suits a moderate oven, 350F, in a shallow buttered dish about 1 to 1.5 quarts. It is done when the centre is just set and no longer liquid under a knife tip.
- Rest the batterWhisk flour and salt into a little of the milk first to avoid lumps, then beat in the eggs and the rest. Twenty to thirty minutes' standing lets the flour hydrate and gives a more even set.
- Boiling in a mouldButter the mould, fill it no more than three-quarters, cover close with a lid or buttered paper tied down with string, and stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pot. Water should reach halfway up and never stop boiling; top up from a kettle of boiling water, not cold.
- Cooking fruit with the puddingUse firm fruit — halved plums, sliced apple, cherries, berries — scattered in the buttered dish before the batter goes in. Very juicy fruit will weep into so thin a batter, so stewed fruit is better drained first and served alongside.
- Yield and servingFour, as stated, and only as a light course. It wants sugar somewhere: either a sweetened fruit sauce, or a sprinkle of sugar over the top before it goes into the oven. The batter itself carries no sweetening at all.
Batter puddings are often described as the plain ancestor of a whole English family of dishes — Yorkshire pudding, the fruit-studded puddings of country cookery, and the French clafoutis they resemble. A batter of milk, eggs and a little flour was a simple way to turn a small quantity of fruit into a filling course, and the same mixture could be baked in a dish or tied into a mould and boiled over the fire, whichever the kitchen equipment allowed. Its place among the "introductory recipes" of a fruit cookbook may be telling: it suggests something like a blank canvas, a foundation to be learned once and then varied with whatever the season offers, rather than a dish with a fixed identity of its own.