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Cottage Pudding
1/4 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar 1 1/4 teaspoons soda 1 cup milk 1 1/4 cups flour 5 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add the sugar gradually. Sift the soda and baking powder with the flour. Add the milk and the flour alternately to the former ingredients. Turn into a buttered oblong pan, and fill about three-fourths full of the mixture. Bake in a quick oven. Cut into squares, and serve with lemon sauce.
A plain butter cake baked in a sheet and served hot under sauce. The one thing to look at before starting is the leavening, which as printed is far outside modern practice.
- The leavening is almost certainly a misprintThe leavening looks like a misprint -- five teaspoons of baking powder plus 1 1/4 teaspoons of soda for only 1 1/4 cups of flour is several times what a cake of this size needs, and it is as likely that the flour quantity was mis-set as the leavening. Batters that overleavened rise fast, collapse, and can carry a soapy, metallic taste from soda that the acid in the baking powder does not fully neutralise. A cake batter of this proportion normally takes about 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and no soda at all unless there is something acidic in it, and the milk here is sweet.
- No egg, and that is deliberateNo egg -- many cottage pudding recipes of the period call for one or two, and this one omits them, which would suit an economy or meatless kitchen. The result is closer to a soft, coarse-crumbed quick bread than a true cake, and it is best eaten warm the day it is made.
- "A quick oven"In books of this era a quick oven is somewhere around 400-450F. For a shallow batter in an oblong pan that is hot; 375-400F is the range a modern baker would use for a sheet cake of this depth, checking at 25 minutes.
- Pan sizeNo dimensions are given. An 8-inch square pan filled three-quarters full suits this quantity; a 9x13 pan will give a thin, dry layer.
- Alternating the additionsThe recipe does not specify a sequence; the usual practice is flour first and flour last, in three flour additions and two of milk. Beat only until each disappears, as overmixing shows up as toughness.
- Lemon sauceThe book assumes you know it: a cornstarch-thickened sugar syrup finished with lemon juice, zest and a lump of butter, poured hot over the cut squares. Any thin pudding sauce, hard sauce or warm fruit will serve the same purpose.
- YieldAbout six to eight squares from an 8-inch pan. It is meant to be served hot, straight from the pan.
Cottage pudding is one of the plainest entries in the American dessert repertoire: a simple butter cake, baked in a sheet, cut in squares and flooded with a hot sauce so that the cake itself need not be rich. The name is often said to signal modesty rather than any particular place, in the same way that "cottage cheese" and "cottage loaf" are thought to, though that reading of the name is traditional rather than documented, and it appears in household cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward as the reliable answer to a weekday dinner that wanted a hot pudding. Its presence in a meatless cookbook is easy to explain: it contains no suet, no marrow and, in this version, not even an egg. The sauce did the work that fat and eggs would otherwise have done, and the version here specifies lemon.