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Plain Pudding
1 pint milk. 3 eggs. 4 tablespoonfuls flour. 1 tablespoonful butter. Put chopped apples or peaches in the batter and bake. Eat with sauce.-Mrs.
A batter pudding of the plainest sort — eggs, milk, flour, butter — closer to a Yorkshire pudding or clafoutis than to anything set with breadcrumbs. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what batter should look like, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- Consistency is the hingeFour tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk gives a very thin batter. Beat the eggs, whisk in the flour with a little of the milk to a smooth paste first, then thin with the rest; adding all the milk at once leaves lumps you cannot beat out.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Bake at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the custard is set at the center and the top is browned and puffed. A hotter oven will blister the top before the middle cooks.
- The butterThe tablespoon of butter is best melted and stirred into the batter, with the baking dish separately buttered. A pint of milk suits a 1 1/2-quart dish; deeper vessels take longer and stay wetter in the middle.
- Fruit quantity"Chopped apples or peaches" is left entirely to judgment. Two cups of fruit is about right — enough to distribute through the batter without waterlogging it. Firm cooking apples hold their shape; very ripe peaches will collapse into the custard.
- No sugar, no saltNeither appears in the list; the sweetness may well have been meant to come from the sauce poured over at table. Add a pinch of salt to the batter regardless, and a spoonful of sugar if the fruit is tart.
- "Eat with sauce"The book carries pudding sauces of the usual kinds, among them a hard sauce (creamed butter and sugar) and thin boiled sauces flavored with wine, lemon or nutmeg. The pudding is plain enough to want one of them.
- YieldServes four to six as written, and it wants eating warm from the dish — batter puddings sink and toughen as they cool.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers; the attribution here breaks off at "—Mrs.", the contributor's name lost or never set down. Puddings of this kind, called batter puddings in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, were the everyday counterpart to the elaborate boiled and steamed puddings that got the long entries — flour, milk and eggs being what a kitchen always had, with whatever fruit was ripe stirred in. The sweetening arrived separately, in a sauce that could be made rich or thin depending on what the household could spare.