Puff Pudding
10 eggs (beaten separately). 10 tablespoonfuls sifted flour. 1 quart milk. A little salt.
Beat the eggs to a stiff froth. Then put the flour with the yolks, then add the milk and lastly the whites, well beaten. Eat with cold or hot sauce.--Mrs.
This is a batter pudding of the popover family: eggs, flour, milk and salt, with no leavening but beaten whites and steam. The original assumes you know it goes into a hot oven, because it never says so.
- The missing instructionNo cooking direction is given at all: the recipe never says whether the pudding is baked or boiled. The batter suits a hot oven. If baked, something like 425F for the first 15 to 20 minutes so the steam lifts it, then 350F for another 20 to 25 until the center is set and dry to a skewer. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- VesselA deep buttered dish holding at least 3 quarts, put into the oven to heat before the batter goes in, gives the best rise; the batter alone comes to about 1 3/4 quarts and needs room to climb. Individual buttered cups or a popover pan work as well and bake in roughly 25 minutes.
- ProportionsTen tablespoons of flour is about 5/8 cup, or roughly 2 3/4 ounces — an extremely lean batter for a quart of milk. The result is closer to a baked custard-crepe than a cake, and it will fall as it cools. That is expected; serve it straight from the oven.
- EggsEggs of the period were unstandardized and on average likely smaller than today's large. Nine large eggs is a fair substitute for ten, though ten will not harm it.
- Folding the whitesWhisk the yolks with the flour and salt to a smooth paste before adding the milk, or the flour will lump and no amount of beating afterward will fix it. Fold the stiff whites in with a light hand and bake immediately — the batter deflates if it stands.
- The sauce"Cold or hot sauce" here would have meant a sweet pudding sauce: typically creamed butter and sugar flavored with wine or nutmeg served cold, or a thin cooked sugar-and-butter sauce served hot. The pudding itself contains no sugar, so the sauce carries the sweetness.
- YieldServes eight to ten as written.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathers contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries trail off into a signature — here truncated to a bare "Mrs." Puff pudding belongs to the long English line of batter puddings that also produced Yorkshire pudding and the American popover: flour, milk and eggs raised by nothing but steam and beaten egg white. By 1878 chemical leavening was already established in American kitchens, but this dish never called for it: the lift came from whites beaten stiff by hand. The instruction to eat it with a hot or cold sauce points to a dessert rather than a meat accompaniment.