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Cottage Pudding
Beat to a cream one large cupful of sugar and two and a half tablespoonfuls of lard and butter mixed. Stir in one well beaten egg, one large cup of buttermilk with soda dissolved in it. Add nutmeg to the taste. Take one pint of flour and rub into it, dry, two tablespoonfuls cream of tartar. Then add the other ingredients. Bake three-quarters of an hour and serve with wine sauce.--Mrs. A. F.
A plain buttermilk cake baked in a pan and sauced at table — the archetypal "pudding" of American cookbooks, meaning dessert rather than custard. Two things are missing from the text: the oven temperature and the amount of soda.
- The soda is unmeasuredButtermilk cake of this size wants about 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda per cup of buttermilk. More than that leaves a soapy, faintly grey crumb.
- The cream of tartar is out of proportionThe cream of tartar looks out of proportion -- two tablespoonfuls rubbed into a pint of flour is more acid than the half-teaspoon or so of soda suggested above could neutralise, and the buttermilk is already supplying acid. Since the recipe leaves the soda unmeasured this is an inference, but the likely result is a metallic, bitter tang. A teaspoon is nearer what the chemistry needs, or leave it out entirely and rely on buttermilk and soda.
- A pint of flourMeasured dry by volume, that is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. Cup sizes were not standardised in the period, and this recipe asks for a 'large' cup, so weigh if you can.
- Lard and butter mixedTwo and a half tablespoonfuls in total, about 35 g; the recipe does not give the proportion, so half of each is a reasonable reading. Straight butter works and browns better; the lard was there for tenderness and economy.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no temperature; about 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Three-quarters of an hour suits an 8-inch square or a deep 8-inch round pan; in a shallower dish it will be done in 25 to 30 minutes, so test with a skewer.
- Mixing orderThe instruction to rub the cream of tartar into the dry flour before combining matters — dispersing the acid evenly prevents streaks of over-risen, coarse crumb.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is butter, sugar, and sherry or Madeira beaten warm, sometimes thickened with a little flour or an egg yolk. Hard sauce or a lemon sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldEight modest squares, served warm with the sauce poured over.
Cottage pudding was the standard American answer to the question of dessert on a weekday: a single-layer butter cake, baked in whatever pan was at hand, redeemed by a hot sauce. It appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks under that name, the "cottage" often taken to signal plainness rather than any particular place. This version in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), contributed like most of the book's receipts by a named or initialled housewife, calls for cream of tartar and soda to be bought separately and combined by the cook, at a time when commercial baking powders such as Rumford and Royal were already widely sold.