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Cottage Pudding (Cup sugar cup butter egg cup)
1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Take the sugar, butter and egg and beat well together; add the milk and the baking powder well sifted in the flour. Bake in shallow pan between two moderately hot radiators for twenty minutes.
Serve with sauce.
A plain butter cake written for a fireless cooker, where heated soapstone or iron discs — the "radiators" — supply all the heat once the box is closed. In a conventional oven it behaves like any 1-2-3 cake.
- The radiatorsA fireless cooker's radiators were metal or soapstone discs heated on the range, then set above and below the pan inside an insulated box; this recipe calls for them "moderately hot" rather than at full heat. Nothing in a modern kitchen corresponds to them; bake instead in a preheated oven at 350F.
- Baking timeTwenty minutes is the fireless-cooker figure, with the discs preheated as the recipe directs. In a 350F oven a shallow 8-inch square pan of this batter takes 25-30 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the edges pull from the sides.
- No browningA fireless cooker gives radiant heat from above and below but no air circulation, so cakes emerge pale and slightly steamed. If you want the top browned, that is an oven job.
- Mixing order"Beat well together" means creaming — the butter should be soft, not melted, and the sugar and egg beaten in until the mixture lightens. This is the only aeration the cake gets besides the baking powder.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is a heavy hand by current standards. Period powders were generally single-acting and released their gas differently from modern ones. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a better crumb and less aftertaste.
- "Shallow pan"An 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, greased and floured. Deeper than about an inch and a half and the centre will lag well behind the edges.
- The sauceThe recipe assumes one: "Serve with sauce." Sauces commonly paired with cottage pudding in books of this date include a hot vanilla or lemon cornstarch sauce, hard sauce, or stewed fruit with its juice; the cake is plain enough to carry them.
- YieldSix to eight servings, cut in squares and sauced at the table while still warm.
Cottage pudding is the American name for a plain cake eaten hot with a poured sauce, and the "pudding" is entirely in the serving — the batter itself is an ordinary one-egg cake. It appears constantly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books because it is cheap, quick, and endlessly variable through the sauce: lemon one night, chocolate the next, berries in season. Its place here in a fireless-cookery section is the interesting part. Fireless cookers — insulated boxes charged with preheated soapstone or iron radiators — were promoted heavily in the 1900s and 1910s as fuel-savers and, in summer, as a way to avoid firing the range at all. Baking in one was the advanced trick, and a small plain cake that could tolerate a pale, soft crust was well suited to the method.