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Cottage Pudding
Rub 2 heaping tablespoonfuls of butter into 1 pound of flour, add 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, I level teaspoonful of cream of tartar, I level teaspoonful of baking-soda, and make into a dough with 1 cupful of buttermilk. Grease a pudding mold, put in the mixture, twist a piece of buttered paper over the top, and steam for one hour.
A plain steamed pudding built on the buttermilk-and-soda principle rather than eggs. The single thing to watch is the liquid: one cup of buttermilk to a full pound of flour gives a very stiff paste, and the mixture needs to be soft enough to drop from the spoon before it goes into the mold.
- The flour-to-liquid ratioA pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups; one cupful of buttermilk will barely wet it. The recipe calls the result a "dough" rather than a batter, but for steaming it will need to be slacker than that word suggests, so add buttermilk beyond the stated cupful until the mixture is thick and sluggish.
- Heaping tablespoonfulsA heaping tablespoon of butter in this period is about an ounce, so 2 heaping spoonfuls is roughly 2 oz (4 tablespoons, half a stick). Rub it in cold with the fingertips as for pastry.
- Cream of tartar and soda togetherThis pair is the pre-baking-powder leavening system, activated the moment liquid hits. The usual proportion given in period sources is 2 parts cream of tartar to 1 part soda; here the two are equal, with the buttermilk supplying the extra acid, so mix and get it into the steamer without delay. About a tablespoon of baking powder can stand in for both.
- The pudding moldAny 1 1/2 to 2 quart heatproof bowl, pudding basin or lidded metal mold will do. Grease it well and fill no more than two-thirds, as this batter climbs.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment twisted or tied over the rim, as the recipe directs, still works; a pleated sheet of foil crimped over the rim is easier and keeps condensation off the top. The pleat matters — the pudding needs room to rise.
- Steaming setupStand the mold on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full hour, topping up with boiling water as needed. A skewer to the center should come out clean.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Cottage pudding is not meant to be eaten dry — turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon sauce, or warmed jam thinned with water.
Cottage pudding was a fixture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household cookery, particularly in America: a plain flour-and-fat batter, cheaply leavened, served hot with whatever sauce the kitchen could spare. The name is usually taken to signal plainness — a dish without eggs, cream, brandy or dried fruit, the cheap cousin of the rich boiled plum puddings of Christmas — though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Published versions commonly bake it as a flat cake with sauce poured over; the steamed treatment here suits a household cooking over a single fire or range top, where a covered pot of water was already at work. The cream of tartar and soda together point to the era when cooks still bought and combined the two components themselves, buttermilk doing double duty as liquid and acid.