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Penny Pudding
Beat five eggs very light. Mix with five tablespoonfuls of flour, one large spoonful of butter and one pint of milk. Eat with sauce.-Mrs. A.T.
A plain batter pudding of the kind Southern cookbooks printed by the dozen, with the cooking left entirely to the reader's judgment. Everything that matters here is what the original omits.
- It is baked, though the recipe never says soIt is most likely baked, though the recipe never says so -- five eggs, flour, butter and a pint of milk is a thin batter pudding, the same family as Yorkshire pudding and English batter puddings. Pour it into a buttered deep dish and bake. Boiled and steamed batter puddings were common in the same period, so the method is the reader's choice.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A modern cook might try around 375F; hotter and the eggs set before the batter climbs, much cooler and it stays slack in the middle. Timing will depend on the dish, but expect roughly 35 to 45 minutes, until puffed, browned and just firm at the centre.
- "One large spoonful of butter"Probably a generous tablespoon, perhaps an ounce, though the book nowhere defines the measure. Melting it and beating it into the milk works better than adding it cold in a lump.
- Tablespoonfuls of flourPeriod spoon measures were not standardised and flour was commonly heaped rather than levelled, so five spoonfuls might come to anywhere from a third to a half cup by modern reckoning. Either way the result is a thin, pourable batter. Judge by the batter, not the count.
- Beating the eggs "very light"This is the leavening. There is no soda or baking powder, so all the rise comes from air beaten into whole eggs and from steam. Beat until pale and thick, then fold in flour and liquid gently.
- The sauce is not optionalThe pudding itself is unsweetened. Period sauces for it were a hard sauce of butter and sugar, or a thin boiled sugar sauce flavoured with wine, brandy, nutmeg or lemon. Without one the dish tastes of nothing much.
- YieldServes four to six, and it is best taken to the table straight from the oven, since a puffed batter pudding sinks as it cools.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of short entries signed with initials like this one, and the brevity may well reflect a book that assumes a cook who already knows that a batter goes into a hot oven and needs no telling. The name is often said to point to cost rather than to any particular ingredient, though this is folk reasoning rather than anything the book states; the dish is in any case nothing but eggs, flour, milk and butter, with the flavour supplied by whatever sauce the pantry could manage. Batter puddings of this shape descend from English cookery, where the same mixture was baked under roasting meat to catch the drippings; served sweet with a wine or hard sauce, it became a household dessert in the American South, cheap enough for a weekday and respectable enough for company.