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Cottage Pudding
2 cups fruit 2 1/2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 cup sugar 1 egg, beaten 1 cup milk 3 tablespoons melted shortening Put in the bottom of round greased pudding dish two cups firm fruit, as sliced apples, peaches, cherries, etc. If very acid, sweeten to taste. Let them heat through and pour over the following mixture: Sift together flour, baking powder and sugar, add beaten egg and milk. Mix well and add shortening. Beat vigorously. Bake 35 to 40 minutes. Serves 8.
A plain baking-powder batter poured over hot fruit — closer to a cobbler than to what most cooks now call cottage pudding. The original omits an oven temperature, which is the one number you need.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given. A batter of this thickness over hot fruit bakes at 350–375F for the stated 35 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre of the batter, not the fruit.
- Heat the fruit firstThe instruction to "let them heat through" before adding batter is the hinge. Cold fruit chills the batter from below and leaves a raw, gummy seam where the two meet. Warm the fruit in the dish in the oven or over low heat until it is steaming.
- ShorteningIn this period shortening means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat. Melted butter works and tastes better; add it last, off the heat, so the batter is not scrambled by it.
- Dish sizeA "round pudding dish" for eight means roughly a 9-inch round or a 2-quart baking dish. In anything shallower the batter spreads too thin and dries out.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2 1/2 cups flour is generous by modern standards but not wrong for a pudding batter meant to rise over wet fruit. Use double-acting powder and get the dish into the oven promptly.
- Fruit choice"Firm fruit" is the operative word — apples, peaches and sour cherries all hold shape. Very juicy or frozen fruit will flood the batter; drain it well or thicken the juice with a spoonful of flour before the batter goes on.
- ServingServes 8. Cottage pudding of this era was commonly sent to table warm with a sweet sauce -- a thin custard, cream, or hard sauce, the last being a firm butter-and-sugar paste rather than something poured.
Cottage pudding appears in American cookbooks from the nineteenth century as the plainest possible dessert: a cup-cake batter baked in one dish and served warm under a sweet sauce, the name usually taken to signal economy rather than any particular place, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. This version is a step further along, with the batter poured over hot fruit so the baking dish supplies both pudding and sauce at once — a construction American cooks otherwise called a cobbler, a sonker, or simply a fruit pudding, depending on the region.