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Poor Man's Pudding
6 eggs. 1 pint sour cream. 1 cupful melted butter. 1 1/2 cupful sugar. 1 teaspoonful soda. 1/2 nutmeg.
Put the butter in after the flour. Make the consistency of pound cake batter.--Mrs. A.B.
A contributor's shorthand: a batter pudding of the kind a cook of 1879 could finish from memory. Two things it never states are the amount of flour and the baking, both of which you have to supply.
- The flour is missingThe instruction "put the butter in after the flour" is the only mention of it, and no quantity is given. The stated target — pound cake batter — is the actual measure: add flour until the batter is thick enough to fall from the spoon in a heavy ribbon rather than pour. The recipe gives no number, so add it gradually and stop by feel.
- Butter last, and whyButter last -- Melted butter stirred in after the flour may help keep the crumb short, though the recipe gives no reason for the order; follow the sequence as written even though it looks odd.
- Sour cream then and nowNineteenth-century sour cream was raw cream left to clabber, and would have differed in body and acidity from the commercial cultured product, though in what direction is not recorded. Modern full-fat sour cream works; if a pint is too stiff to combine easily with the eggs, slacken it with a few tablespoons of buttermilk.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the cream, and it is the only lift in the recipe apart from the eggs. Sift it with the flour so it disperses, and get the pudding into the oven promptly; the reaction begins the moment wet meets dry and does not wait.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly two teaspoons, so half is about a teaspoon of freshly grated — a strong, deliberate flavour rather than a background note. Grate it yourself; pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity tastes dusty.
- BakingNo oven or time is given, and the recipe names no oven at all. Bake it as a pound cake: around 350F in a buttered deep dish or tube pan, until a skewer comes out clean — reckon on 45 minutes to an hour depending on depth. It will sink slightly as it cools.
- YieldSix eggs and a pint of cream make a substantial pudding: eight to ten servings.
The name is the joke. A pudding built on six eggs, a pint of cream, a cup of butter and half a grated nutmeg is not the food of the poor; "poor man's" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks often seems to have signalled the absence of the genuinely expensive things — raisins and currants, citron, brandy, wine sauce — that separated a proper plum pudding from an everyday one, though the usage was not consistent. What remains is a dish assembled from what a Virginia household kept on hand: eggs, souring cream from the dairy, butter, sugar, soda. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, drew its receipts from some two hundred and fifty contributing Virginia housewives, and prints them largely as they were sent in, initials and all. That accounts for the missing flour. Mrs. A. B. knew what pound cake batter looked like and presumably assumed her reader did too.