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Cottage Pudding
Cream together one cup of sugar and one-fourth cup of butter; add one beaten egg, two-thirds of a cup of milk, one and one-half cups of flour, sifted with two teaspoons of baking powder. Bake in a buttered tin for thirty to forty minutes.
One cup of stoned cherries or berries may be added to this recipe.
A plain butter cake by another name, written for cooks who knew what temperature to expect and what to pour over it. The two things the original leaves out are the oven setting and the sauce.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. For a cake of this kind 350F is a reasonable modern setting; at that temperature a single layer will take the full thirty to forty minutes, so check at thirty with a skewer in the centre.
- PanA "buttered tin" is unspecified; for this quantity of batter a shallow square or round cake tin of about 8 inches suits. Butter it and, if your tin is not nonstick, line the base with paper. The batter will also fill a 9x5 loaf tin, which will likely need closer to fifty minutes.
- The batter is stiffOne and a half cups of flour to two-thirds cup milk gives a thick batter rather than a freely pourable one. Spread it level in the tin.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one and a half cups of flour is a generous but normal ratio for the period, and it still works with modern double-acting powder. Sift it with the flour as directed so it distributes evenly through the stiff mixture.
- Cherries or berriesToss the cup of stoned cherries or berries in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they sink. Frozen fruit should go in unthawed and may add five minutes to the bake.
- The sauce is the pointCottage pudding was conventionally served with a sauce rather than bare: a hot pouring sauce such as vanilla or lemon, or else a cold hard sauce, served over each portion at the table, which is what turns a plain cake into a hot dessert.
- YieldAn 8-inch tin cuts into six to nine servings, depending on how much sauce goes over each.
Cottage pudding is the American name for the humblest possible hot dessert: a plain cake baked in a tin, cut warm, and drowned in sauce. It appears constantly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books precisely because it costs almost nothing -- one egg, a quarter cup of butter, no eggs beaten separately, no steaming, no water bath -- and because it uses the same creamed-butter method a cook would already know from layer cakes. The "pudding" in the name refers to its place in the meal rather than its texture; in this period any hot sweet course served at the end of dinner could be called a pudding, whatever it was made of. The optional cup of cherries or berries is the standard concession to whatever was in the house, and the fact that the recipe does not specify a sauce says more about the era than any instruction could: a reader was presumably expected to have a vanilla or lemon sauce already in her repertoire.