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Cottage Pudding
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 egg 2 tablespoons shortening Sift together flour and baking powder; add milk, sugar, salt, well-beaten egg and melted shortening; beat 2 minutes. Pour into greased pan and bake in hot oven about 20 minutes. Serve with lemon or other sauce.
A plain one-egg cake batter, thin enough to pour, meant to be cut in squares and flooded with hot sauce. It comes together in one bowl and lives or dies by the sauce.
- Pan sizeThe original names no pan. The batter is thin and pours, and will bake as a shallow layer; a small pan suits this quantity. A loaf pan makes it too tall and the centre stays wet.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no degrees; in books of this era hot is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-425F. For a shallow cake batter with this much sugar, the lower end is safer: about 400F for 20 minutes, testing at 18.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is generous by modern standards. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, and behaved differently from today's double-acting cans, releasing its gas on mixing rather than in the oven's heat. With a modern powder 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons gives the same rise.
- ShorteningAny solid cooking fat, melted: lard, a vegetable shortening or butter. Butter is the best tasting of them; the recipe is so plain that the fat is most of the flavour.
- "Beat 2 minutes"Two minutes was aimed at hand beating in a bowl. With an electric mixer, well under a minute is enough; a long beating makes the crumb tough.
- The sauce is the dishCottage pudding is deliberately bland; unsauced it is a dry teacake. Have a hot lemon sauce (sugar, cornstarch, water, lemon juice and zest, a lump of butter) or a vanilla hard sauce ready before the cake leaves the oven, and serve it warm.
- YieldA small cake, cut into squares. It stales quickly, as any low-fat cake does, and is best the day it is baked.
Cottage pudding is one of the workhorses of nineteenth-century American home cooking: a cheap butter-light cake baked in a pan and served hot under a sweet sauce, so that it counted as pudding rather than cake. The name is generally taken to mean simply a pudding for a cottage — plain, unshowy, no dried fruit, no wine, no long steaming in a cloth. Its appearance in the New Royal Cook Book is commercial as much as culinary: Royal Baking Powder distributed such booklets free to promote chemical leavening, and a recipe calling for two teaspoons of powder in a single cup of flour was doing its advertised job. The sauce, not the crumb, was where a cook showed off, and lemon sauce was among the most common.