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Batter Pudding, Baked
INGREDIENTS for a good-sized pudding.-1½ pint of milk, 4 tablespoonfuls of flour, 2 oz. of butter, 3 eggs, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Mix the flour with a small quantity of cold milk; make the remainder hot, and pour it on to the flour, keeping the mixture well stirred; add the butter, eggs and salt; beat the whole well, and put the pudding into a buttered pie-dish; bake for hour, and serve with sweet sauce, wine sauce, or stewed fruit. Baked in small cups, very pretty little puddings may be made; they should be eaten with the same accompaniments as above.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Batter Pudding, Baked, with
A plain Victorian baked batter pudding — essentially a sweetened-at-table Yorkshire pudding, served with sauce or fruit. The method is sound; only the vessel, the oven and the baking time need translating.
- The hinge: scald the flourPouring hot milk onto a cold-milk-and-flour slurry while stirring gelatinises some of the starch and gives the pudding its characteristic soft, custardy set rather than a rubbery crumb. Keep whisking as the hot milk goes in or you will get lumps that no amount of beating will clear.
- Cool before the eggsLet the scalded mixture drop to lukewarm before beating in the eggs, or they will scramble in threads through the batter. The recipe does not mention this step.
- Measurements1 imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml). Four tablespoonfuls of flour is somewhere around 35-50 g depending on how heaped the spoon is - this is a deliberately loose, slack batter, closer to a baked custard than a cake.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat. A moderate oven, about 350-375F (175-190C), suits it; higher heat will puff the edges and leave the centre wet.
- Baking timeThe fraction before 'hour' has dropped out of the text, in the method and in the TIME line alike. In a buttered pie-dish this quantity will take roughly 45 minutes to an hour at 350F, until set in the middle and browned at the rim; small cups nearer 20-25 minutes.
- ButterMelt the 2 oz and add it warm, whisking hard, so it disperses rather than pooling on the surface as the pudding bakes.
- Yield and servingA "good-sized pudding" of this quantity will serve four to six. Serve it hot from the dish; what rise it has will subside as it cools.
- Sweet sauce and wine sauceNeither appears in the ingredient list; both are given as separate recipes elsewhere in the book. A sweet pudding sauce is broadly butter and sugar thickened with a little cream or water; a wine sauce is much the same with sherry or Madeira standing in for most of the liquid. Stewed fruit is the least trouble of the three.
Batter puddings appear among Mrs Beeton's B entries because in the nineteenth-century English household a batter of flour, milk and eggs was the cheapest way to make a filling dish appear at either end of a meal. The same mixture, dripped under a joint, became Yorkshire pudding; baked in a buttered dish and sent up with wine sauce, it was pudding proper. The recorded average cost of 8d sits alongside the method — Beeton's costings let a housekeeper compare dishes at a glance, and a pudding that fed a family for well under a shilling earned its place. The instruction to bake it in small cups reflects a Victorian fondness for individual moulds, which let a modest quantity of batter be presented as several "pretty little puddings" rather than one.