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Chicken Pudding
One-half pound of flour, one quart of milk, four eggs, six ounces of butter, one large or two small chickens. Season very highly with pepper and salt. Serve immediately upon baking. Line the dish with the chicken, pour batter over it.
Have the dish hot before the chicken is put in. Margaret Sutton Briscoe.
A batter pudding in the Virginia manner — closer to a savory Yorkshire pudding with chicken buried in it than to anything a modern cook calls pudding. The original assumes knowledge the printed lines do not supply.
- Cook the chicken firstThis is the instruction the recipe leaves out, and the one that matters. Older versions of the dish call for the bird to be jointed and parboiled or gently fried until tender before it goes into the dish; the batter sets long before raw joints would reach 165F at the bone. Poach or brown the pieces through, then assemble.
- Weights to volumesHalf a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups; six ounces of butter is 1 1/2 sticks. A quart of milk with four eggs and that much flour gives a thin, pourable batter, not a dough.
- The hot dish"Have the dish hot before the chicken is put in" is not a nicety. As with Yorkshire pudding, the batter needs to hit a hot buttered vessel so it climbs and puffs rather than sitting flat and dense.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A batter pudding of this size wants roughly 400F for the first 20 minutes to lift, then 350F for another 25 to 35 minutes until set through and browned at the edges.
- Butter distributionSix ounces is a great deal for one batter. It is worth using part of it to grease the hot dish generously and working the rest into the batter or dotting it over the chicken; melting it all into cold milk will leave visible flecks.
- "Season very highly"The batter is bland by design and takes salt hard. Season the poaching liquid or the browned chicken as well as the batter, or the pudding tastes of flour.
- ServingServes six to eight as a main course. The instruction to serve immediately is literal — a batter pudding collapses within minutes of leaving the oven, and reheated it becomes solid.
Chicken pudding of this kind is a Chesapeake and Virginia dish, and its best-known printed ancestor is the recipe titled "Chicken Pudding, a Favourite Virginia Dish" in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824), where jointed chickens are stewed until nearly done and then baked under an egg-and-milk batter. The technique is English batter-pudding practice — the same principle as the pudding baked beneath roasting beef — carried into an American kitchen and given poultry instead of drippings. The recipe is attributed to Margaret Sutton Briscoe, an American writer of the late nineteenth century; like other contributed recipes in such collections it appears to have been printed much as sent, assuming a reader already knew a chicken had to be made tender before it met a batter.