Home › Puddings and Desserts › Baked Flour Pudding
Baked Flour Pudding
5 eggs 3/4 cup flour Pinch of salt 1 quart milk Beat the eggs separately and then together; stir in the sifted flour and the milk; strain and pour into a buttered pudding dish. Bake half an hour and serve immediately with lemon or vanilla sauce.
This is a batter pudding rather than a custard: five eggs and a quart of milk carry only three-quarters of a cup of flour, so it sets soft and puffs at the edges. Nearly everything the original leaves out concerns the oven.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A pudding of this type belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. Hotter and the outside sets into a skin while the centre is still liquid.
- TimingHalf an hour is unlikely to set a full quart of thin batter in a deep dish; in a shallow one it may come closer. Allow up to 45 to 60 minutes at 350F, and judge by a knife inserted off-centre coming out clean rather than by the clock.
- Dish size"A buttered pudding dish" is not specified; the batter comes to about a quart and a half, so use a dish of at least 2 quarts. Wide and shallow sets faster and more evenly than deep and narrow; leave an inch of headroom, as the pudding rises before it settles.
- Beating the eggs separatelyThis most likely means yolks and whites in separate bowls, then the two combined. It lightens the batter, though in a thin batter pudding much of the rise comes from steam in the oven.
- StrainingThe recipe calls for it. Whisking flour into eggs leaves lumps and stringy bits of white, and straining catches them.
- There is no sugarThe batter is unsweetened on purpose; all the sweetness comes from the poured sauce. If you serve it plain it will taste like a savoury Yorkshire pudding.
- Serve immediatelyMeant literally. A batter pudding is at its highest straight from the oven and sinks within a few minutes. Have the lemon or vanilla sauce hot and waiting.
- YieldSix servings, with sauce.
Baked flour puddings descend from the English batter pudding, the same mixture of eggs, milk and flour that becomes Yorkshire pudding when it is baked under meat drippings and dessert when it is baked in a buttered dish and sauced. It was among the cheapest sweets a cook could put on the table from stores she already kept: no chocolate, no dried fruit, no sugar even, just eggs and milk and a little flour, with a poured lemon or vanilla sauce doing the work of flavouring.