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Cottage Pudding with Shortening & Peaches
1 C sugar ¼ C shortening 1 C sweet milk 2 eggs Peaches and powdered sugar 2 C flour --- Mrs. W. J. Dillon. 2 t baking powder. Few grains salt. Any desired flavoring to suit fruit.
This is written in the shorthand of a church-supper cookbook: a list of proportions for a cook who already knows what a cottage pudding is. Two things need saying before you start, one of them a genuine omission in the original.
- The leavening is missingA 2-cup-flour butter cake with 1 cup milk cannot rise on two eggs alone; period cottage puddings are almost always chemically leavened, usually with baking powder, sometimes with soda and sour milk. Whether a line was dropped in setting the type or the contributor simply assumed it, we cannot say. Reckon on about 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and understand that you are supplying it, not reading it.
- No method is given eitherThe standard order for this batter is: cream the shortening with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour (sifted with the baking powder and salt) alternately with the milk, in three or four additions. Do not overwork it once the flour is in.
- Sweet milkSimply plain milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that a soda-raised recipe would want. Whole milk is closest to what she had.
- ShorteningAt this period the word covered lard, a lard-and-butter mixture, or a branded vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour in a plain pudding like this; 1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons, and it is a lean cake by modern standards.
- Oven and panThe original gives neither. A greased 8-inch square pan at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back, suits this batter. A deeper pan will need longer and the edges will dry.
- The peachesThey are the point of the dish, not a garnish. Sliced fresh peaches, sugared and left half an hour to draw their own syrup, spooned over squares of warm cake with powdered sugar sifted on top. Tinned or frozen peaches with their juice work in winter.
- YieldAbout nine squares from the 8-inch pan suggested above, best eaten the day it is baked while still slightly warm.
Cottage pudding is not a pudding in the boiled, cloth-wrapped English sense at all, but a plain one-egg-or-two butter cake served warm under a sauce, and the name marks it as the humble alternative to a steamed or moulded dessert. American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century print it endlessly, usually with a hard sauce, a lemon sauce, or a hot vanilla sauce; the version here is made with fresh peaches and powdered sugar. Its presence in a community church cookbook is typical: these volumes were assembled by subscription to raise money for the congregation, each woman signing her name to a family standby, and a cake that stretched a quarter cup of shortening into a dessert was exactly the sort of thing worth passing on.