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Cottage Pudding (Tablespoon butter cup sugar)
1 tablespoon butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg Pinch of salt 3/4 cup milk 1½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder - Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the egg and beat again. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add them alternately with the milk. Turn into a buttered cake pan and bake about half an hour. Serve with vanilla or lemon sauce.
A plain one-egg cake baked in a pan and eaten warm under a sweet sauce. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. Half an hour is about right for a shallow pan; the cake is done when the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Pan sizeThe recipe specifies only "a buttered cake pan". An 8-inch square or round, about 2 inches deep, suits this quantity of batter; in a wider pan the batter runs thinner and will be done sooner, so start checking well before the half hour.
- Only a tablespoon of butterOther period cottage puddings are similarly lean, so the small quantity is not obviously an error; the sauce carries most of the richness. Creaming one tablespoon of butter with a full cup of sugar will look like damp sand; that is normal, and the egg brings it together.
- Alternating wet and dryAdd the flour mixture in three parts and the milk in two, beginning and ending with flour, and stop as soon as it comes together. Overbeating after the flour goes in gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is a brisk rise by modern standards but works with double-acting powder. Sift it with the flour and salt as directed rather than dumping it on top of the milk.
- The sauce is the pointNo sauce recipe is given here. A workable lemon sauce is sugar and cornstarch cooked with water until clear, then finished off the heat with butter, lemon juice and zest; a vanilla sauce is the same base with vanilla and no acid. Serve it hot over warm cake.
- YieldSix to eight servings from an 8-inch pan. It is best the day it is baked, since there is too little fat to keep it tender overnight.
Cottage pudding is one of the great thrift desserts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery: a plain cake batter, baked rather than steamed, and promoted to "pudding" by the sauce poured over it. The name is often said to signal its class — cottage cooking, as against the boiled and brandied puddings of a grander table — and the recipe turns up in general American cookbooks of the period in much the same form from book to book. Its persistence owes a good deal to chemical leavening, which had made a one-egg cake something a cook could throw together between other tasks without waiting on yeast or beating a dozen eggs. A formula this short and this cheap is exactly what earned its page.