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Feather Pudding
2 cupfuls flour. 1 cupful sugar. 1 cupful sweet milk. 1 egg. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. Season with nutmeg and eat with sauce.-Mrs. D. C. K.
A lean, fast batter pudding of the cottage-pudding type: almost no fat, one egg, and chemical leavening in place of long beating. The book assumes the cook knows how to mix and bake it, so the method has to be reconstructed.
- Work quickly once mixedCream of tartar and soda react as soon as they are wet, and there is no yeast or long beating to fall back on. Have the pan buttered and the oven hot before the milk goes in, and get the batter into the heat immediately.
- The leavening, translated1 teaspoon cream of tartar with 1/2 teaspoon soda is the period equivalent of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder for 2 cups of flour. Sift both with the flour rather than dumping them into the wet mixture.
- Sweet milkThis means fresh, unsoured whole milk, distinguished from the buttermilk and clabber that older recipes often called for. Ordinary whole milk is correct.
- No method is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk. The batter will be thick and pourable, not stiff.
- BakingThe book gives no method or temperature. An 8-inch square or round buttered pan in a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 35 to 40 minutes, until the centre springs back, suits a batter of this kind. It can also be steamed in a buttered mould for about an hour and a half, which gives a damper texture.
- Only a tablespoon of butterThat is the whole fat content. It also means it dries out fast; serve it the day it is made, warm, and do not expect cake-like keeping.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the dry ingredients. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar loses most of its aromatics and this pudding has little else to carry flavour.
- The sauce is not optionalA batter this lean is built to be eaten wet. Period choices are hard sauce, a lemon or wine sauce, or a plain boiled vanilla sauce; the book prints several elsewhere.
- YieldSix to eight servings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, and this one carries only the initials of Mrs. D. C. K. and no instructions. Puddings called "feather" turn up across nineteenth-century American cookbooks and simply advertise lightness, in contrast to the boiled suet and bread puddings that dominated earlier household books. The recipe belongs to a moment of transition in leavening. Cream of tartar paired with soda gave cooks a measurable lift at a time when commercial baking powder was not yet universal in Southern kitchens, and recipes of this period frequently specify the two separately. What makes it a household staple rather than a company dish is the economy: two cups of flour, one egg, and a single tablespoon of butter, stretched into a dessert for a family by the sauce poured over it.