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Cherry Pudding (Eggs cupful melted butter)
10 eggs. 1 cupful melted butter. 1 quart milk, make in a thick batter. 1 pound dried cherries (stoned).--Mrs. Dr. E.
This is a memorandum rather than a method — the flour, the sugar, the pan and the oven are all left to the cook's judgment. The proportions are recoverable, but two things have to be supplied before it can be baked.
- The missing flour"Make in a thick batter" is the whole instruction, and no quantity of flour is given. With a quart of milk, ten eggs and a cup of butter, how much it will take is entirely a matter of judgment; work it up gradually until the batter mounds on the spoon rather than dumping it in.
- No sugar is listedDried cherries of the period were often sour varieties dried without sweetening, so this pudding as written would be nearly savoury. Puddings of this kind were commonly sent to table with a sweet hard sauce or wine sauce, but the recipe itself says nothing about how it was served.
- Dried cherries need revivingDried cherries may need reviving -- if yours are hard, steep them in warm water or milk for 20 to 30 minutes and drain before folding in, or they will pull moisture out of the batter and stay leathery.
- "Stoned" means pittedDried cherries sold today are pitted already. If you use whole home-dried fruit, the pits must come out first — they are not incidental.
- A cupful of melted butterThat is 8 fl oz, about 225 g or two sticks. It is a great deal of fat by modern standards and gives a rich, close, almost custard-cake texture rather than anything light.
- Oven and vesselThe recipe specifies neither, and does not actually say whether the pudding was baked or boiled. If you bake it, a buttered deep dish or heavy pan at around 350F for 50 to 70 minutes is a reasonable modern guess; test with a skewer in the middle, since the top will colour long before the centre sets.
- YieldTen eggs and a quart of milk make a very large pudding — enough for 12 to 14 servings. Halve everything for a household-sized dish.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of entries like this one: a list of proportions initialled by the woman who supplied it, on the assumption that any reader could fill in the rest. Dried cherries belong to the era before reliable home canning was widespread, when summer fruit was preserved by drying on trays or strings and then reconstituted through the winter — which is why a fruit pudding in an old Southern book so often calls for dried rather than fresh fruit. The batter pudding itself is an English inheritance, closely related to the baked batters and "boiled" cloth puddings of the eighteenth century.