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Cheese Batter Pudding
Beat 2 eggs well together, add 1 cupful of milk, ½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder and 1 cupful of flour. Beat hard for three minutes then stir in 1 cupful of grated cheese. Pour into a shallow buttered pan, sprinkle a little more cheese over the top, add i large teaspoonful of butter cut into bits and bake for an hour in a hot oven. Serve for luncheon or supper.
II2
A cheese-enriched batter pudding in the Yorkshire pudding family, thickened slightly with baking powder rather than relying on steam alone. The main thing to fix is the baking instruction, which as written will scorch the top long before the hour is up.
- Oven and time"A hot oven" in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F, and a full hour at the upper end risks scorching the cheese crust. Baking at 375-400F for 30-40 minutes, until the centre is set and the top browned, is the safer modern reading; the pudding is done when a knife inserted at the middle comes out clean.
- Pan sizeA "shallow buttered pan" is unspecified, but the batter volume suits something like an 8-inch square or a 9-inch pie plate. The batter is thin, so a deeper dish tends to give a soggy middle and a longer bake.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in an American cookbook of this sort means a firm, dry, sharp store cheese; a good aged cheddar is the closest thing now. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and will make the batter pasty; grate it yourself.
- Flour measureOne cupful of flour, scooped as cooks then did, runs 4 to 4.5 oz (roughly 115-130 g). The batter should pour like heavy cream; a little extra milk is harmless if it seems stiff.
- BeatingThe three minutes of hard beating hydrates the flour and works air into the batter. Do it, but do not extend it after the cheese goes in - fold the cheese through with a few strokes only.
- Baking powderEarly twentieth-century baking powders were often single-acting, so the batter was meant to go straight into the oven. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but there is still no advantage in letting it stand.
- Yield and servingServes three to four as a light main course. It falls as it cools, like any batter pudding, so bring it to the table directly from the oven with something sharp alongside - pickles, chutney, or a green salad.
- The stray numberThe "II2" at the end is a page or recipe number picked up in transcription, not part of the method.
Batter puddings - flour, eggs and milk beaten hard and baked in a hot pan - were an English staple that crossed to American kitchens as the base for everything from Yorkshire pudding to popovers, and adding grated cheese was a natural economy: a cupful of cheese stretched over four servings turned a starchy side dish into the centre of a meal. Recipes of this kind belong to the era's cheap-protein cookery, when household writers were pressing cheese, eggs and legumes as "meat substitutes" for luncheon and supper, the two lighter meals of a day whose main dinner, in many households, came at midday or early evening. The baking powder is worth noting, since older English batter puddings relied entirely on steam and vigorous beating for lift, and chemical leavening was by this period increasingly common on both sides of the Atlantic.