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Cottage Pudding
1/4 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 1/4 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten; mix and sift flour, baking powder, and salt; add alternately with milk to first mixture; turn into buttered cake-pan; bake thirty-five minutes. Serve with Vanilla or Hard Sauce.
A plain butter cake baked in a shallow pan and served hot under a sweet sauce. The one thing the original omits is the oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. 350F is the usual modern equivalent for a plain butter cake, and thirty-five minutes at that heat suits a shallow batter of this size.
- Pan size"Cake-pan" is unspecified; a single round or square layer pan of about 8 or 9 inches, buttered, suits this quantity of batter.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2 1/4 cups flour is generous by current standards. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder will raise the cake adequately if you find the full amount leaves an aftertaste.
- FlourMeasure by spooning into the cup and levelling rather than scooping, or the cake turns dry.
- Mixing orderThe original directs the sifted dry ingredients to be added alternately with the milk. Stop as soon as the batter comes together; overbeating after the flour goes in toughens the crumb.
- DonenessThe cake should spring back when pressed and pull slightly from the pan sides. A skewer in the centre comes out clean.
- The saucesVanilla sauce is a cornstarch-thickened sweet white sauce, served warm. Hard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavouring, served cold in a spoonful on the hot cake so it melts down into it.
- Yield and servingAbout six to eight servings from a pan this size. Cottage pudding is meant to be cut and sauced while still warm from the oven.
Cottage pudding is a baked alternative to the steamed or boiled pudding: a plain cake, cut hot and served under a sauce. The name signals modesty rather than any particular place, "cottage" commonly serving in the nineteenth century as a label for the cheap and unpretentious version of a thing, as in cottage cheese and cottage pie. It is common in American household manuals of the later nineteenth century. The generous dose of baking powder marks it as a product of the chemical-leavening era, when a pudding could be on the table in under an hour without a suet crust or a pudding cloth.