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Cottage Pudding
1/2 cup sugar 1 egg, well beaten 2 cups flour 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Cream the butter, add gradually the sugar and egg. Sift together thoroughly the flour, baking powder and salt and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Bake in a moderate oven 35 minutes. Serve with vanilla or hard sauce. Crushed strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, and juicy crushed sweetened fruits or jellies and preserves can be served with this pudding. COTTAGE PUDDING (PEACH) Make batter as for Cottage Pudding. Stir in 2 cups sliced peaches, bake in square pan and serve with hard sauce. Apples, raisins, currants, pears or any chopped or sliced fruits can be used in a similar way with this batter.
This is a plain butter cake served warm under a sauce, and it is one of those advertising-cookbook entries where the ingredient list has been clipped short in reprinting. A few numbers have to be supplied before you can bake it.
- The missing quantitiesOnly flour, baking powder and salt survive in the list, yet the method calls for butter, sugar, egg and milk. Contemporary cottage pudding batters of this size run about 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg and 1 cup milk; treat those as reconstruction, not as what the book actually said.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere in the 350-375F range; the book gives no temperature. Thirty-five minutes suits a shallow square pan of about 8 inches; the peach version, being wetter, may want longer and a skewer test in the centre.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was and is a double-acting powder, so any supermarket double-acting powder will stand in; 3 level teaspoons to 2 cups flour is generous by modern habit but typical of period recipes. Level means level, struck off with a knife, not heaped.
- Alternating flour and milkAdd the dry mixture and the milk in three or four turns, beginning and ending with flour, and stop mixing the moment the last streaks disappear. This is the hinge of a cottage pudding: overworked batter goes tough and tunnelled, and there is no frosting to hide it.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavouring, served cold in a lump so it melts over the hot cake. It is not cooked, and it wants to be genuinely cold going onto genuinely hot pudding.
- Vanilla sauceThe other option, generally either a cornstarch-thickened sweet milk or water sauce or a thin vanilla custard, poured warm. Either way it is a pudding served warm from the pan.
- The fruit versionTwo cups of sliced peaches in a batter this size will sink somewhat. Toss the slices with a spoonful of the measured flour first, and expect a soft, damp layer near the base rather than fruit suspended throughout.
- YieldBaked in a square pan of about 8 inches it cuts into nine squares, or six generous servings with sauce; the book gives no pan size for the plain version.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which is why the leavening is named by brand in the ingredient list and measured in level teaspoons: the whole point of such books was to teach households to trust a canned chemical leaven and to use it precisely. Cottage pudding is generally traced to an American nineteenth-century idea of economy, a plain one-egg cake baked in a pan and dignified into dessert by whatever sauce or preserve the house had, which is why the recipe ends with a list of alternatives rather than one prescription. The word pudding here carries its older, looser English sense of a sweet course served with sauce, not a custard.