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Cottage Pudding
3/4 cup sugar 3 tablespoons melted butter 1 cup milk 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg 2 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour Bake for one and one-half hours and serve with liquid sauce. Put in the bottom of a round pudding dish one pint of firm fruit, sliced apples, peaches, cherries, etc. If very acid sweeten to taste. Let them heat through and pour over the above mixture. Bake thirty-five to forty minutes. Invert on round platter. Serve with whipped cream or sauce. The fruit may be stirred into the batter and baked in a round loaf. If the fruit is very juicy scant the measure of milk. If bananas are used serve with banana sauce.
The text runs two versions of the pudding together — a plain batter baked long and served with sauce, and an upside-down fruit version baked briefly — so read it twice before you start. A few figures need translating and one needs judgment.
- The two bake times are not a contradictionThe two bake times most likely belong to different versions -- "Bake for one and one-half hours" to the plain pudding baked deep in a pudding dish, the thirty-five to forty minutes to the shallow fruit version. The text does not say so outright, and an hour and a half is long for a batter of this size. For the fruit version in a 9-inch round dish, 35 to 40 minutes should do it; test with a skewer in the batter, not the fruit.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was common in flour-company books of the period. A moderate oven, 350F, suits both versions. The deep plain pudding wants the lower end of moderate, around 325F, or the outside sets long before the middle.
- Mixing method is omittedCream the sugar into the melted butter, beat in the egg, then add the milk alternately with the flour and baking powder sifted together. Do not beat after the flour goes in beyond what combines it.
- The batter is stiff by designOne cup of milk to 2 1/2 cups flour gives a thick drop batter, not a pour. Spread it over the hot fruit with a spatula. The instruction to "scant the measure of milk" with juicy fruit means use slightly less than a full cup.
- Flour measurementGold Medal was a general-purpose family flour and modern all-purpose stands in directly. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling — scooping packs in an extra ounce or two and turns this pudding dry.
- No salt, no flavouringPeriod cake recipes often left both out, sometimes on the assumption that the butter was salted. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt and a teaspoon of vanilla or a little grated lemon rind.
- "Liquid sauce"A thin pourable pudding sauce — sugar, butter, boiling water thickened with a little cornstarch, flavoured with lemon, vanilla or nutmeg — as opposed to hard sauce, which is a solid butter-and-sugar paste. Banana sauce would presumably be mashed ripe banana beaten into that base.
- Fruit quantity and yieldOne pint of sliced fruit is roughly 2 cups, about two or three medium apples or peaches. The whole thing fills a 9-inch round or 8-inch square dish and serves six to eight.
- InvertingLoosen the edge and turn it out while still hot; the fruit juices set to glue as they cool and the pudding will tear.
Cottage pudding is one of the workhorses of nineteenth-century American home cooking: a plain butter cake, deliberately unfrosted, whose whole point is the hot sauce poured over it at the table. The name signals modesty rather than any particular place — the cottage pudding stood opposite the rich boiled and steamed puddings of a formal dinner, and it used ingredients a household kept year-round. The fruit-on-the-bottom variation given here is the same idea that later hardened into "upside-down cake" in American cookbooks of the 1920s and 30s. Its appearance in a Gold Medal book is straightforwardly commercial: Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis, the milling firm behind the Gold Medal brand and later part of General Mills, published cook books to demonstrate that its flour handled every category a housewife needed, and a single batter that yields three different puddings makes the argument efficiently.