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Fruit Pudding
2T sugar & 1 T butter creamed 1 C flour Mrs. A. M. Casey. 1 heaping t baking powder 1/2 C milk Grease pan. Cover with brown sugar. Spread with peaches or apricots (fresh or canned). Cover all with above batter: Bake in 375°F. oven about 25 minutes. Serve with cream. Mrs. S. C. Kimball. 1 T butter 1 egg 3/4 C milk
A cobbler-style batter pudding baked over sugared fruit, typical of the terse community-cookbook style where the contributor assumed you already knew the method. The transcription has two contributors' entries running together, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- Which ingredients belong to this recipeThe working batter appears to be 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon butter creamed, 1 cup flour, 1 heaping teaspoon baking powder, and 1/2 cup milk. The trailing "1 T butter 1 egg 3/4 C milk" has no sugar or flour with it and is almost certainly the opening of an adjacent recipe caught in the same block of text; whose it is cannot be determined from the page. Ignore it, or use it as a variant batter with the same flour and baking powder.
- T and tCapital T is a tablespoon, lowercase t a teaspoon. "1 heaping t baking powder" is a generous teaspoon, somewhat more than a level one in modern measure, which is in the right range for a cup of flour.
- The brown sugar is unmeasuredNo quantity is given for the layer that lines the pan. Half to three-quarters of a cup, packed, gives a good syrup with fruit; more than that and the bottom turns to hard candy as it cools.
- Pan sizeThe recipe names no dish. This amount of batter suits an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, roughly 2 inches deep, with the fruit in a single layer. Spread thinner than that and the 25 minutes will overbake it.
- Spreading the batterWith only 1/2 cup milk to a cup of flour this is a stiff drop batter, not a pourable one. Drop it in spoonfuls over the fruit and coax it out with the back of a wet spoon; it need not seal to the edges, since the fruit juice comes up through the gaps.
- Canned fruitDrain canned peaches or apricots well and pat them dry. Packing syrup on top of the brown sugar layer makes a soupy pudding that never sets under the batter.
- Doneness375°F for 25 minutes is accurate for this depth. The top should be dry and springy and a skewer through the batter only should come out clean; the fruit layer stays loose and syrupy by design.
- Serve with creamHere this means unwhipped heavy cream poured over each portion at the table. Serve warm, not hot from the oven, so the syrup thickens slightly. Yields about six modest servings.
Church and society cookbooks like this one were compiled by soliciting a favorite receipt from each member, printed under her name as both credit and endorsement, and sold to raise money for the congregation. The compressed style here is characteristic: contributors wrote for neighbors who had eaten the dish, so pan sizes, sugar quantities, and basic procedure went unrecorded. The run-together state of the text above may be a setting artifact of the original page or of the transcription; there is no way to tell from the text alone. The dish itself belongs to the large American family of batter-over-fruit puddings — cobblers, sonkers, buckles, and what a later generation marketed as upside-down cake — whose spread owed a good deal to two things this recipe takes for granted: reliable chemical baking powder, commercially available from roughly the 1860s onward, and canned peaches and apricots, which made a fruit pudding a year-round possibility.