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Fruit Pudding (Eggs pint milk tablespoonfuls)
4 eggs. 1 pint milk. 4 tablespoonfuls flour. 1 tablespoonful butter. Apples or peaches cut in thin slices, and dropped in the better. Serve with sauce.--Mrs. Dr. S.
This is a batter pudding in the English style: a thin egg-and-milk batter poured over sliced fruit and baked or steamed. The original assumes the cook already knows the method, so most of what follows is reconstruction rather than translation.
- The batter is meant to be thinFour tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk and four eggs gives something closer to a crepe batter than a cake batter. It sets custardy and slightly puffed, not crumbed, and it will sink as it cools. That is correct.
- Melt the butter firstA tablespoon of butter cannot be creamed into a liquid batter. Melt it, let it cool a little, and whisk it in last so it does not cook the eggs.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A pudding of this composition bakes at 350-375F for 40-50 minutes, until set at the centre and browned at the edges. A buttered 2-quart dish or a 9-inch deep pie plate suits the quantity.
- Or steam it, as many Virginia cooks would haveOr steam it -- batter puddings of this period were also boiled or steamed in a buttered, covered mould set in a pot of simmering water, roughly 1.5 hours. The recipe itself specifies no method. The texture comes out denser and paler, and the sauce matters more.
- How much fruit"Apples or peaches" is left open. Two to three cups of thin slices is the working amount; more than that and the batter cannot hold together. Peel peaches, and use a firm tart apple that will not collapse.
- There is no sugar in the batterThe recipe calls for none, and the only sweetening implied is the sauce it ends with. If you want the pudding itself sweet, two to three tablespoons of sugar in the batter will not upset the set.
- What "sauce" meantIn a book of this period a pudding sauce is a sweet one: hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and brandy or nutmeg), or a thin wine or lemon sauce.
- "Dropped in the better"A printer's error for "batter." The fruit goes into the batter, not the other way round, though scattering it in the dish and pouring the batter over gives a more even result.
- YieldSix modest servings. Best eaten warm within an hour of baking; it deflates and weeps if held.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, drew on contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries carry only an initial and a title. Who "Mrs. Dr. S." was is not recoverable now. The recipe belongs to the old English family of batter puddings, the same lineage that produced Yorkshire pudding and, on the other side of the Channel, the cherry clafoutis: eggs, milk and just enough flour to bind, poured over whatever fruit the season offered. Its terseness is characteristic of the genre, and it leaves oven heat, baking time and quantity of fruit to the cook's judgement.