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Raspberry Pudding
One pint flour, six eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately. Mix the eggs with a pint of milk and one cupful of butter. Into this stir the flour. Make the berries very sweet. Mash them and stir them into the batter. Bake in a dish and serve with sauce.--Mrs. C. C.
A rich baked batter pudding of the pancake-and-clafoutis family, leavened only by beaten eggs. The original assumes a cook who knows what a finished batter looks like, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- A pint of flourNineteenth-century American cooks measured flour by volume: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. Against a pint of milk, six eggs and a cup of butter this makes a loose, pourable batter before the fruit goes in.
- A cupful of butterThat is half a pound, 8 oz. Melt and cool it slightly before mixing, or it will seize into lumps against the cold milk. This is the single richest element in the dish and it is what keeps the crumb tender without any chemical leavening.
- The eggs do all the liftingThere is no baking powder or soda here. The original directs the whites and yolks to be beaten separately and then mixed with the milk before the flour; a modern cook may instead reserve the whites and fold them in last to keep more air, though that departs from the printed order.
- Quantity of berriesThe original gives none. About a pint of raspberries, mashed with 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar and left to stand ten minutes, is in keeping with the batter's proportions. Much more and the juice thins the mixture past setting.
- OvenThe original gives no oven instruction beyond "bake in a dish". A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, and a buttered 2-quart dish will serve; expect roughly 45 to 55 minutes, until the centre is set and a knife comes out clean. It will puff and then sink somewhat on cooling.
- The sauceLeft unspecified, as pudding sauces often were in books of this kind. Hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and a little brandy or sherry), a thin wine sauce, or plain sweetened cream are all period-plausible and all work.
- YieldServes eight generously. Best warm, within an hour or two of baking, as the fruit continues to weep into the crumb as it stands.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled attributions -- "Mrs. C. C." would have been known to the book's first readers and is lost to us now. Baked batter puddings like this one descend directly from English practice, where a flour-egg-milk batter served as the vehicle for whatever fruit was in season, and the American versions kept the form. Raspberries were a dooryard crop across the Upper South and had a short season, which is why so many nineteenth-century books hurry them into puddings, vinegars and shrubs rather than assuming they would keep. The instruction to "make the berries very sweet" left the judgement to the cook: garden raspberries were often sharp, and she was expected to taste and judge rather than follow a number.