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Continental Pudding
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 3 eggs beaten well. 1/2 cup buttermilk. 1 teaspoon soda. 1 1/2 cups flour. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. 1 teaspoon nutmeg. 1 cup jam or preserves.
Bake in pan. Serve with caramel sauce.
This is a jam cake in all but name, written in the shorthand Mrs. Wilson used when she assumed the reader already knew how a butter cake is put together. Almost every process instruction has been left out, so the gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Method, which the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs, then add the flour, spices and soda alternately with the buttermilk. Fold the jam in last so it stays in streaks rather than dissolving into the batter.
- "Bake in pan" means a moderate oven"Bake in pan" is all the recipe says; no oven temperature is given. A moderate oven — around 350F — suits a cake of this kind. A greased 8-inch square or a 9x5 loaf pan; the loaf will want closer to 50 minutes, the square about 35. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the buttermilk, and it is the only leavening in the recipe. Cultured buttermilk from a carton works; sweet milk lacks the acid to react with the soda, so expect less lift and a possible soapy note.
- No salt, no vanillaPeriod cake recipes often assumed salted butter. If yours is unsalted, add half a teaspoon of salt with the flour or the spices will read as muddy.
- The jamA cup is a generous amount for a cup and a half of flour. A thick, stiff preserve — blackberry, damson, apricot — holds its shape; a loose jelly will sink and make a wet seam at the bottom.
- NutmegA teaspoon of nutmeg is assertive by modern standards, and pre-ground spice is generally milder than a fresh grating. Start with half if you are grating your own.
- Caramel sauceMrs. Wilson gives no formula here. Any standard brown-sugar-and-cream caramel serves; make it while the cake bakes and pour it warm over cut slices.
- YieldEight to ten servings, and it improves on the second day once the jam has scented the crumb.
- Filed under VegetablesIf the original does shelve it there, that looks like a filing error rather than any clue about the ingredients. There is nothing vegetal in it.
Jam cakes of this kind — butter, buttermilk, soda, warm spices and a cup of preserves stirred through — were a fixture of American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward, especially in the South, where they were a way of using up the previous summer's putting-up before the new crop came in. Calling one a "pudding" and serving it hot under a sauce reflects an older English habit in which a baked, steamed or boiled sweet at the end of the meal was a pudding regardless of its texture; the narrowing of the word to mean the custardy sort is largely a later usage. Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers during and just after the First World War, and was associated with wartime food-conservation work; her recipes are characteristically compressed: ingredients listed, method assumed.