Home › Cookery › Delicious Hasty Pudding
Delicious Hasty Pudding
Seven eggs beaten separately. Add to the yolks gradually ten tablespoonfuls of sifted flour, alternately with a quart of milk and half a teaspoonful of salt. Beat till perfectly smooth. Then add the whites, pour into a buttered dish, and bake twenty minutes. Eat with nun's butter or wine sauce.-Mrs. P. McG.
A baked batter pudding of the Yorkshire family, sweetened only by what you pour over it. The original gives no oven temperature and a suspiciously short baking time, so both need judgment.
- Oven heatNone is stated, as the book assumes a wood range and a cook who can read it. For a batter this thin, a hot oven of 400-425F gives the puff the recipe is counting on; the eggs and steam do the lifting.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticA quart of milk with seven eggs will not set in twenty minutes in anything deep. Bake it in a wide, shallow buttered dish of about 2 1/2 to 3 quarts and it may be done in 25-30 minutes; in a deep casserole expect 45 minutes or more. It is finished when the center is set and no longer sloshes.
- Ten tablespoonfuls of flourJust over half a cup, which with a full quart of milk makes a very loose batter, more custard than pudding. This is deliberate, but it means the pudding will not slice; serve it with a spoon.
- Beaten separatelyThe whites are folded in last and are the only leavening. Fold them in with a light hand and get the dish into the oven at once, or the batter deflates while you work.
- Buttered dishButter generously. Warming the buttered dish for a minute or two before the batter goes in is a common precaution: it helps against sticking and encourages the edges to rise. The recipe itself says nothing of it.
- Nun's butterA hard sauce, creamed butter and sugar flavored with wine or brandy; the book presumably gives a receipt for it elsewhere. Some versions include raw egg; if yours does, skip the egg or choose a sauce without it.
- YieldServes six to eight, and it must go to the table immediately. Like all batter puddings it sinks within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
"Hasty pudding" in England meant flour stirred into boiling milk until thick, quick to make and quicker to eat; in America the name attached itself to cornmeal mush, the stuff of Yankee Doodle and Joel Barlow's mock-epic poem, composed in 1793 and published in 1796. Neither is what Mrs. P. McG. is describing. Her pudding is a baked egg-and-milk batter, closer kin to a Yorkshire pudding or a French clafoutis without fruit, and the old name has simply been borrowed for something that is genuinely fast to assemble even if the oven takes its time. The contributor's initials are typical of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), which Marion Cabell Tyree built by collecting receipts from some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, crediting them by name or initial, so that the book reads as a network of kitchens rather than a single voice. That a dish this plain was expected to arrive with a wine sauce or a brandied hard sauce says a good deal about where sweetness came from at a Virginia table: not from the batter, but from the sideboard.