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Batter Pudding
6 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon melted butter 3 eggs 1 qt. sweet milk Bake one hour.
A bare-bones formula of the kind printed when every cook already knew what a batter pudding looked like. The proportions are unusually lean, and no oven temperature, dish or serving note is given.
- The ratio is very thinSix tablespoons of flour to a quart of milk is far less flour than other printed batter puddings, which often run nearer a cup of flour to a pint of milk. Expect something closer to a baked custard than a popover batter: it will set from the eggs more than the flour, and it will not puff.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term. A moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, is the usual modern equivalent for a custard-like baked batter; a hotter oven risks curdling the egg and milk before the centre sets.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which older recipes call for when saleratus or soda is used. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim gives a watery, weeping pudding.
- Salt and sugarThe recipe lists neither. Other printed versions of this pudding commonly include a little salt, about half a teaspoon, and such puddings were often served with a sweet sauce rather than sweetened in the batter.
- MixingBeat the eggs, add the milk and melted butter, then whisk into the flour gradually, or sift the flour over the liquid. Flour added all at once to a quart of milk lumps and the lumps will not beat out.
- The dishUse a buttered deep baking dish of about two quarts, or set the dish in a pan of hot water for a gentler set. An hour in a moderate oven suits a deep dish; a shallow one will be done sooner, when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Batter pudding of this era went to the table hot with a hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla sauce, or simply stewed fruit; it is plain to the point of blankness on its own.
Batter pudding is the ancestor of both the Yorkshire pudding and the popover: flour, eggs and milk beaten thin and baked, though such puddings were also boiled in a cloth or bag, and the form associated with Yorkshire was set under the roasting meat so that it caught the drippings. By the time the milling companies began giving away cook books to sell their flour, the dish had migrated to the pudding chapter as a cheap, filling sweet, dressed up with a sauce. The Gold Medal book, issued by the Minneapolis millers who owned the brand, is a promotional volume, which explains the telegraphic style: the recipes were written for cooks who needed reminding of proportions rather than taught a method.