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Cake Mixtures and Puddings: Cover
Bread and Butter Pudding. 2 eggs 2 C. milk 4 T. sugar butter spk. salt C. raisins or currants stale bread 1. Cut stale bread in one-fourth inch slices and spread with butter. 12. Cut slices into triangular shaped pieces and put a layer in the bottom of the buttered pudding dish. 3. Cover with one-half the raisins which have been picked over and washed. 4. Repeat, having top layer buttered bread. 5. Beat the eggs, add sugar, salt and scalded milk and pour mixture over pudding. 6. Bake same as rice pudding. 7. Serve with cream or hard sauce.
Cottage Pudding. 1 T. butter 2 C. flour C. sugar 3 t. baking powder 1 egg t. salt C. (?) milk. 1. Mix by either cake method or batter method of mixing. Mixture should be a soft drop batter. 2. Bake in a shallow pan in moderate oven. 3. Cut in squares and serve hot with vanilla or lemon sauce.
See Exercise XIV for Vanilla Sauce.
Brown Betty. 4 C. sliced apples 1/4 C. brown sugar 2 C. soft bread crumbs 1/4 t. cinnamon C. water 1/4 t. nutmeg 1/4 C. butter 1/2 lemon, juice and grated rind 1. Melt the butter and stir the crumbs into it. 2. Mix sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon rind. 3. Put one-third of the crumbs into a buttered baking dish. 4. Add one-half the apples. 5. Sprinkle with one-half the mixed sugar and spices, add one-half the water and lemon juice. 6. Repeat. Cover with the remaining crumbs and bake about forty-five minutes. Cover at first to prevent crumbs browning too fast. 7. Serve with cream and sugar or lemon sauce.
Hard Sauce. top.
C. butter 1/2 t. lemon extract t. vanilla spk. nutmeg 1 C. powdered sugar 1. Cream butter and add sugar gradually. 2.
Add vanilla and lemon extract. 3. Heap on serving dish and sprinkle nutmeg over the 4. Put in ice box until ready to serve.
Note. The stiffly beaten white of an egg may be beaten into the sauce after the flavoring has been added. It will make the sauce lighter
Four related dessert recipes from a school cookery manual, written in the abbreviated shorthand students were expected to have memorised. The measurements assume a demonstration kitchen where the instructor filled in the gaps aloud.
- The abbreviationsC. is a cup, T. a tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, and spk. a speck — roughly what you can pinch between two fingers, less than an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractional numerals: the raisins in the bread and butter pudding (the sugar there is printed as 4 T.); the sugar, salt and milk in the cottage pudding (the butter is printed as 1 T.); and the brown sugar, cinnamon and water in the Brown Betty (crumbs, nutmeg and butter survive intact). Judge by proportion between about a third to a half cup of sugar and a cup of milk to two cups of flour for the cottage pudding, and about half a cup of brown sugar to four cups of apple for the Brown Betty.
- Baking the custard"Bake same as rice pudding" points to a slow oven, and custards of this kind were commonly set in a pan of hot water; since the rice pudding recipe it refers to is not on this page, the temperature is inference (a slow oven is usually read as around 325F). Pull it when the centre is just set and still trembles; a custard baked until firm all through has already curdled.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" is conventionally read as about 350F. In a shallow pan it should take roughly half an hour.
- Brown Betty timingForty-five minutes suits firm cooking apples cut thin. Keep it covered at first as directed, then uncover so the top crumbs crisp. Soft varieties will collapse to sauce well before the crumbs colour.
- Soft bread crumbsThese are torn or rubbed from the inside of a stale loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dried crumbs will absorb the apple juice and go pasty.
- The egg white in the hard sauceThe note adds an uncooked egg white to a sauce that is never heated. Use a pasteurised white if you want the lighter texture, or leave it out — the sauce is complete without it.
- YieldThese quantities make roughly four to six servings each. The hard sauce makes enough for about the same number and keeps, covered, in the refrigerator.
These four belong together as a group in an American domestic-science course: a baked custard pudding, a plain cake batter, a fruit and crumb pudding, and the sauce that dresses them. School cookery was taught as thrift as much as technique, and bread and butter pudding in particular exists to use the end of a loaf. Brown Betty appears in American print from the mid-nineteenth century onward and the origin of the name is not documented; the various stories attached to it are traditional rather than established. "Hard sauce" takes its name from its firmness, not its flavour, and is close to the preparation the English call brandy butter, with vanilla and lemon standing in for the spirit in a book written for a classroom.