Home › Desserts-Puddings › Cherry Pudding
Cherry Pudding
1 C sweet milk 2 t baking powder - salt 1 or 2 C pitted cherries Bake in oven 45 minutes. Serve with sauce made with brown sugar, cornstarch, hot water and a little butter.
This is a church-supper shorthand recipe: the contributor listed only the parts she thought might be forgotten, and left out flour, sugar, fat and oven temperature entirely. It can be reconstructed, but you are filling in a batter rather than following instructions.
- What is missingAs printed there is no flour, sugar or fat, and no oven temperature. A cup of milk with 2 teaspoons baking powder and salt is the wet half of what looks like a cottage-pudding batter; batters of that kind commonly carried something like 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 to 4 tablespoons melted butter, and often an egg.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A pudding of this type is usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350F, in a greased shallow baking dish; forty-five minutes at that heat suits a cake-like batter.
- "Sweet milk"Ordinary whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus or soda instead of baking powder. Do not substitute buttermilk here; the leavening is wrong for it.
- C and tC is a cup, t a teaspoon. These abbreviations were still unstandardized in community books of this era, so a lone "t" occasionally meant tablespoon; with 1 cup of milk, 2 teaspoons baking powder is the sensible reading.
- The cherriesSour pie cherries, fresh or home-canned, are the likely intent. Drain canned or frozen fruit well and toss it with a spoonful of the flour before folding it in, or the batter will go soggy and the fruit will sink.
- The sauceNo proportions are given. A brown sugar sauce of this period ran roughly 1 cup brown sugar and 1 tablespoon cornstarch whisked smooth with 1 cup hot water, simmered until it thickens and clears, then finished off the heat with a tablespoon of butter. Cook it long enough to lose the raw starch taste.
- YieldSix to eight servings, cut in squares and served warm with the sauce poured over.
Community and charity cookbooks were compiled from handwritten cards submitted by members, printed cheaply and sold to raise money, and gaps like the one seen here are common in them: a cook writing for neighbors who already knew how a pudding batter went saw no reason to spell out flour and sugar. The dish itself belongs to the large American family of cottage puddings, plain cake batters baked with fruit and served hot under a sweet sauce, which filled the dessert pages of American books through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they used cheap staples and whatever fruit was in the cellar. Sour cherries ripen briefly in early summer and were routinely canned for winter baking. The brown sugar and cornstarch sauce is the frugal alternative to a custard or hard sauce, requiring no eggs and no cream.