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Excellent Batter Pudding
1 quart flour. 7 eggs. 1/2 cupful melted butter. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in lukewarm water. 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar, also dissolved. Enough sweet milk to make a batter the consistency of sponge cake batter. Bake in a mould and eat with brandy sauce.--Mrs. M.C.C.
A baked batter pudding of the plainest sort, leavened with soda and cream of tartar and leaning on eggs for its lift. The original assumes you know what sponge cake batter looks like, which is the only real guidance on the milk.
- The hinge: batter consistencyEverything depends on getting the batter to the thickness of sponge cake batter — it should fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon that sinks back within a few seconds, not pour like cream. Too thin and the pudding is custardy and heavy; too thick and it will not rise around the eggs.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book. A quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb (about 500-560 g) of all-purpose flour depending on how it is measured. Sift it before measuring if you want to match the lighter hand of the period.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, in the standard 1:2 ratio. About 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder does roughly the same work. The recipe directs that both be dissolved in lukewarm water; once they meet in the wet batter the reaction starts, so get the pudding into the oven promptly.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber that many recipes of the era called for. Whole milk. Expect to need somewhere between 2 and 3 cups to reach the right consistency, but add it gradually and judge by eye rather than by number.
- EggsEggs of the 1870s were on average smaller and less uniform than today's, so six large eggs is a reasonable substitute. They are the main structure here, so beat them well before they go in.
- The mould and the ovenA mould means a deep tin or earthenware form: a tube pan, a deep cake tin or a pudding basin all work. Butter it heavily. No temperature is given in the original; as a modern starting point, 350F for 45 minutes to an hour will suit a deep mould, testing with a skewer at the centre.
- Brandy sauceOne common period brandy sauce is butter and sugar creamed together, thinned with a little boiling water or cream and flavoured with brandy, served warm over the hot pudding. The pudding itself contains no sugar at all, so it depends on the sauce for sweetness.
- YieldA quart of flour and seven eggs makes a large pudding, comfortably 10 to 12 servings. Halve it for a household of four.
Batter puddings run straight back to English cookery, where a beaten mixture of flour, eggs and milk was first baked beneath roasting meat to catch the drippings and later sweetened, moulded and served on its own with a sauce. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered such recipes from named contributors across Virginia households, names which stand in for a real woman who sent her family's version in. The leavening is the home-mixed sort: soda paired with cream of tartar, each dissolved separately, a combination cooks used over a long span, well after commercial baking powders came onto the market. The brandy sauce suggests, though it does not prove, a dish meant for company rather than every day.