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Cottage Pudding
1 cup milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Cream butter and sugar together; add yolks of eggs beaten until thick, flour in which baking powder and salt have been sifted, alternately with milk; beat well and add the well-beaten whites. Pour into a well-buttered pudding dish. Bake forty-five minutes. Serve with lemon, vanilla, or wine sauce.
A plain butter cake baked in a deep dish and served warm under a sauce — the batter is straightforward, but the printed instructions leave both the oven and the creaming quantities to the cook's judgment.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, as was normal when ranges had no dial. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for forty-five minutes in a deep pudding dish. Start checking at 35 minutes if your dish is wide and shallow.
- Butter, sugar and eggsThe measured list covers only the milk, flour, baking powder and salt; the amounts for the creamed butter and sugar and for the eggs are not specified here. Conventional proportions for this batter in books of the period run to about 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar and 2 eggs, but that is convention rather than what is printed.
- Pudding dishA pudding dish of this period is a deep ovenproof earthenware baking dish, roughly the volume of a modern 8-inch square pan or a 1 1/2-quart casserole. Butter it heavily; there is no parchment in the original scheme and this batter sticks.
- Separating the eggsBeating the whites separately and folding them in last lightens the crumb. With modern double-acting baking powder you can beat whole eggs into the creamed butter and sugar and lose very little.
- Alternating flour and milkAdd the dry mixture and the milk in three or four turns, beginning and ending with flour, and stop as soon as each addition disappears; overworking after the flour goes in gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Testing for donenessThe cake is done when it springs back at the centre and a skewer comes out clean. Because it is baked deep rather than in a thin layer, the middle lags well behind the edges.
- ServingCottage pudding is meant to be eaten warm, cut in squares straight from the dish, with the sauce poured over at the table. The dish serves six to eight. Wine sauce is a sweet sauce flavoured with wine, commonly sherry or Madeira; lemon and vanilla sauces are usually a cornstarch-thickened base with a different flavouring.
Cottage pudding is a piece of plain American economy: an ordinary butter cake, baked in the dish it is served from and turned into a pudding by the sauce rather than by anything in the batter. The name, in use by the second half of the nineteenth century, carries the same suggestion as cottage cheese or cottage pie — homely, unfussy, no pastry and no steaming cloth. It earns its place in the dessert chapter of a chocolate manufacturer's book because it is a blank base: a chocolate sauce in place of the lemon or wine sauce turns it into a company dessert without any extra work.