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Delicious Pudding
Beat the yolks of six eggs very light. Stir in alternately three tablespoonfuls of flour and a pint of milk. Put a tablespoonful of melted butter and half a teaspoonful of salt in the batter. Then stir in the whites of the six eggs, beaten to a stiff froth. Butter the baking dish or cups, fill them a little more than half full, and bake quickly. Eat with wine sauce. Make this pudding half an hour before dinner, as it must be eaten as soon as done.--Mrs. S.T.
This is a baked batter pudding, close kin to a popover or a plain soufflé: no sugar in the batter at all, with the sweetness carried entirely by the sauce. It rises on beaten egg white and steam, and it falls fast, which is why Mrs. S.T. tells you to start it half an hour before dinner.
- Serve it the minute it leaves the ovenThis is the hinge of the recipe. The structure is egg foam and steam, and it begins collapsing within two or three minutes of coming out. Have the sauce hot and the table sitting down before you open the oven.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe calls for speed rather than naming an oven; in modern terms that means a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F. That heat is what drives the rapid rise; a moderate oven tends to give a denser, damper result.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. The batter will look alarmingly thin next to a modern cake batter, which is correct for this style of pudding.
- Folding the whites"stir in" here is best read as what we would call folding. Work the stiff whites through in two or three additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible; overworking will knock out the air the pudding depends on.
- Dish or cupsIndividual cups (custard cups or a deep muffin tin) rise higher and cook faster than one large dish. Butter them generously and fill just past halfway as directed. Times are a matter of judgement rather than instruction here: check cups early and give a single dish considerably longer, taking it out as soon as it is puffed and set.
- Wine sauceA common nineteenth-century version is butter and sugar creamed together, thinned with a beaten egg or hot water over low heat, and flavoured with sherry or Madeira. It is a sauce, not a syrup, and was poured over at the table.
- YieldSix eggs and a pint of milk serve six to eight.
Batter puddings of this kind run straight back to English cookery, where a flour-egg-milk batter was first baked under roasting meat and later given its own dish; the same family produces Yorkshire pudding on the savoury side and this sort of sweet-sauced pudding on the other. What marks the Virginia version is the wine sauce, which one imagines lingered on Southern dessert tables for some time afterwards, and which suggests how much Madeira and sherry circulated in Tidewater households. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end, as this one does, with a set of initials rather than a title. The instruction to make it half an hour before dinner may imply a kitchen with someone watching the oven and a dining room within carrying distance of it, though that is inference rather than evidence.