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Baked Sponge Pudding
This is simply hot cake with sauce, and may be the regular sponge cake mixture, but the following is easier, cheaper, and answers equally as well. 1 pound of sugar. 10 eggs. 1/2 pound of butter melted 1/2 pint of tepid milk. 1 1/2 pounds of flour. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Beat the sugar and eggs in a kettle as if making sponge cake, but two or three minutes will do. Then add the other ingredients, the powder just before the flour; beat up well, bake in shallow baking pans greased and floured, with granulated sugar sifted over the top before putting in the oven. The cake rises considerably and should be only half an inch deep when put in the pans. It should be baked of a very light color, and have a handsome grazed appearance. Cut out in squares. Plenty of sauce is required. A suitable article to make on short notice, and may be varied by having raisins, etc., mixed in.
The next is cottage pudding. It is supposed that in pastoral days it was called love-in a-cottage pudding, because a very fashionable belle said she saw a love of a pudding in the cottage where she stayed till the shower was over. But as love in a cottage went out of fashion, and it came to be love in a grand hotel with a suite of rooms and all the modern conveniences the poor pudding lost half its title and remains as follows:
A hotel baker's sheet-cake pudding, written in bakers' pound weights for a crowd. The instructions are sound; what needs translating are the vessel, the volumes and the oven.
- "Kettle" means a mixing bowlIn period trade kitchens the kettle was generally the deep metal basin the sponge was whipped in. Use a stand mixer bowl, warmed if your kitchen is cold, and beat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick.
- The weights in cups1 lb sugar is about 2¼ cups; ½ lb butter is 2 sticks; 1½ lb flour is roughly 5½ cups; ½ pint tepid milk is 1 cup. Use 10 eggs as written.
- Halve it unless you are feeding twentyHalve it unless you are feeding a crowd -- this is a full commercial batch: at half an inch deep it will fill roughly a half-sheet pan or more and yield a great many squares. Halving or quartering the formula works cleanly.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven is implied: the batter is shallow and the author wants it baked 'of a very light color', so pull it while the top is barely gold and watch it rather than the clock.
- The sugar on topGranulated sugar sifted over the batter before baking is what gives the "grazed" (glazed) crust the author wants. It melts into a thin crackling sheet, so do not skip it and do not use powdered sugar.
- Order of mixing mattersAdd the baking powder just before the flour, as written. Melted butter and milk should be tepid, as the recipe specifies, not hot, or they will deflate the beaten eggs.
- Sauce is not optionalThe author says "plenty of sauce is required": a hot vanilla or lemon pudding sauce, hard sauce, or a thin custard, ladled over at service.
- Raisins and variationsToss dried fruit in a little of the measured flour before folding in, or it will sink through a batter this loose.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks in the 1880s and 1890s, which is why the quantities arrive in pounds and the advice is about speed and cost rather than domestic economy. Baked sponge pudding and cottage pudding are the same idea under two names: a plain cake baked shallow, cut in squares and drowned in hot sauce, a way of turning a cheap batter into a dessert course. The etymology Whitehead offers for cottage pudding, the belle who saw "a love of a pudding" in the cottage, is a joke rather than a documented origin; the name is generally traced simply to the plainness of the cake, a cottage dish as opposed to a rich company one. What the passage really records is the moment when the American hotel dining room, with its suites and modern conveniences, had absorbed the homely puddings of the previous generation and kept them on the menu because they were cheap and could be made on short notice.