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Delicious Jam Pudding
1 cup jam. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 4 eggs.
Bake in stone dish fifteen minutes. Serve hot with whipped cream.
One of the barest entries in the book: an ingredient list, a baking time, and nothing else. Assume some judgment is required, because the original assumes a cook who has made batter puddings before.
- The recipe is incomplete as printedThere is no flour, no crumbs and no leavening, so as written this is jam, butter, sugar and eggs baked into a sweet custardy mass rather than a pudding with structure. Other jam puddings of the era generally include a starch (flour or fine breadcrumbs) and often a leavening; adding roughly a cup of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder will give the dish the title promises, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's own instruction.
- Eggs, whole or separatedFour eggs to a cup of sugar and half a cup of butter is a very rich, very loose batter. Beating the yolks with the butter and sugar and folding in the stiffly beaten whites at the end gives the lift the recipe otherwise has no source for.
- "Stone dish"A stoneware or earthenware baking dish, of the kind kept for puddings and scalloped vegetables. It heats slowly and holds heat. A modern ceramic or glass baker of about 1 1/2 quarts is the equivalent; a thin metal pan will set the edges long before the centre.
- Oven temperatureUnstated in this entry. In modern terms 350F suits an egg-rich batter of this kind; hotter and the surface souffles and cracks before the interior sets.
- Fifteen minutes is optimisticPossibly it assumes a thin layer in a wide dish. In anything deeper, expect 30 to 40 minutes at 350F, and judge by a centre that is set and barely trembling rather than by the clock.
- The jamUse a stiff, sharp preserve -- raspberry, damson, sour cherry, apricot. A cup of jam is a great deal of sugar on top of a cup of granulated, so a tart fruit keeps the finished pudding from being cloying. Loose modern jams and fruit spreads will thin the batter noticeably.
- YieldSix modest servings. It must go to the table hot, with unsweetened whipped cream -- there is quite enough sugar in the pudding itself.
- Filed under VegetablesPlacement -- The entry appears to sit among vegetable recipes; if so, that is an indexing slip rather than a hint about the ingredients. Nothing vegetable belongs in it.
Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book (1920) collected material Mary A. Wilson had written for the Ladies' Home Journal during and just after the First World War, when she wrote regularly on wartime substitution and household economy. That background shows in the telegraphic style here: a list, a time, a serving note, and an assumption that the reader has made a dozen baked puddings and needs only the proportions. Jam puddings themselves come out of the British steamed and baked pudding tradition, where a spoonful of preserve was the cheapest way to flavour and sweeten a batter of flour, fat and eggs, and they are generally said to have crossed into American home cooking as oven-baked versions once ranges replaced the pudding cloth and copper. The misplacement of this entry in a chapter on vegetables is a reminder of how easily a recipe could land several chapters from home.