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Currant Batter Pudding
1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 6 ozs. (6 heaping tablespoonfuls) cleaned currants 3 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking powder Pinch salt I/2 pint (I cup) milk 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Golden syrup Beat up the eggs, sift in the flour and the salt, add the milk, and beat for five minutes; then add the baking powder and the vanilla extract.
Pour into a well-greased casserole, sprinkle the currants over the top, and bake in a moderate oven for one hour.
Serve with golden syrup.
A plain baked batter pudding, closer to a sweetened Yorkshire pudding than to a cake. Two details decide the result: the oven temperature and what you do with the currants.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. An hour at that heat sets the batter through and browns the top; hotter and the outside will be firm while the centre stays wet.
- The casseroleHere simply a fireproof earthenware or china baking dish. Use a 1.5 to 2 quart dish, greased well, and bake uncovered so the top can brown; the recipe gives no instruction to cover it.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Sprinkled over the top they will partly sink and partly scorch; tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour first keeps them suspended.
- Half a pintThe recipe glosses it as 1 cup, which is the American measure. Follow the parenthetical figures throughout rather than converting.
- Baking powder lastIt goes in after the five minutes of beating, as written. Beating it in from the start wastes most of the lift before the pudding reaches the oven.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups of flour to one cup of milk and three eggs gives a fairly thick batter, though the recipe still expects it to be poured into the dish. Do not thin it further.
- Golden syrupA British cane inversion syrup, still sold under the Lyle's name. Light corn syrup pours the same way but lacks the faint bitterness; warmed honey or a light treacle is nearer in flavour.
- Yield and donenessThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities would serve roughly four to six. A skewer in the centre should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides; serve warm, as it stiffens on cooling.
Batter puddings are the older, plainer branch of the English pudding family: flour, eggs and milk beaten together and baked, the same mixture that goes under roasting meat as Yorkshire pudding. Sweetened versions with dried fruit were standard nursery and everyday fare in Victorian and Edwardian households, cheap in eggs and cheap in fuel because they could share an oven with something else. Golden syrup, generally traced to the Lyle refinery at Plaistow in the 1880s, appears here as a poured sauce rather than as jam or custard. The recipe's appearance in a casserole-cookery book reflects the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for fireproof earthenware, sold on the promise that a dish could go from oven to table without a second serving vessel.