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Cottage Pudding with Rasberry Vinegar
A flour compound midway between cake and batter pudding. 1/2 pound of sugar. 1/4 pound of butter. 6 eggs. 1 pint of milk. 1 1/2 pounds of flour. 3 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Level teaspoonful of salt. Make up like pound cake, by creaming the sugar and butter together, adding the eggs two at a time, the milk and then the flour with powder and salt. Bake either in cake mould and slice like pound pudding, or else in a baking pan, shallow, to be cut in squares. Takes from twenty to forty minutes. Lemon syrup sauce is a good substitute for rasberry vinegar.
Rasberry vinegar is a favorite sauce with the English for all sorts of flour and egg puddings and pancakes. Directions for making it will be found at the end of this book.
From this time forth stern duty requires us to stay at home and deal only in American productions. In this little private exposition as many foreign countries have been represented as small expositions generally can boast of. The space allotted Great Britain was necessarily the largest, but France was not far behind, albeit very few French flags were set to mark the nationality of the goods. One country is entirely unrepresented, that is Central Africa; yet it is not the fault of the culinary commissioners, but of the country itself. A careful examination of the books of Stanley's explorations ends fruitlessly. It appears plainly that the interior of Africa, or the African's interior-and if there is any difference in the terms whichever is right will do-is altogether unacquainted with pudding.
There is one nice pudding material which might, perhaps have been placed in the rice department of the Lower Nile but has been excluded through a prejudice against the label on the packages, which is a picture of "natives manufacturing manioca," and looks too much like "natives gathering chow chow leaves for Doctor Helmbold's extract of chow chow." Manioca makes pudding quite equal to rice. Pound some rice in a mortar, sift out the coarse, sift out the flour, use the middle, sago-like grains and you will not know it from manioca. The farina or rice pudding receipts will do for it. China makes a fair showing if rice, yams, and birdsnests be credited to her. The East Indies has only one article, sago pudding, but that is quite important in its relation to this country.
Every reader who will recall to mind the first American Indian romance he ever read will recollect how they always used to greet each other with "Sago, sago, great chief!" Sago is the pith of a tree; and that is why the Indians got such a reputation for short and pithy sentences. But there is more in it than that "Where did the Indians come from?" is a question never yet satisfactorily answered, notwithstanding the attempts to prove them the lost ten tribes, and floaters across Behring's Straits. The word sago, it is seen, is in spontaneous use among them. Saco, sachem, saguache, saguiam etsego, (which the English used to pronounce hot-sago) and other words, all meaning places where they have something to eat are but corruptions or deviations from the same root. Sago is Asiatic. The sago tree which yields the edible pith is native in the East Indian islands. Our Indians must have brought sago with them from that country. Now if the anthropological or some other suitable society would follow up this matter, perhaps they would be able to prove that our Indians came from the land of sago in the East Indian Archipelago, and thus settle a much mooted question.
Our Indians have never been accused of stupidity, but have often shown themselves to be true Americans by their ready appreciation of a good thing when they had it. They had not been long in this country before they found out that American Indian corn was far better than East Indian sago, and so pleased were they with the discovery that--as is proven by Catlin's magnificent work on the North American Indians, and by the writings of all the poets and novelists from Longfellow down who have drawn their particulars from that source--they instituted a green corn dance to take place yearly upon the first appearance of the succulent roasting-ears of which the following pudding is made:
A plain butter cake baked as a pudding and served hot under a sauce. The batter is written in bakers' weights and makes a large quantity; read the flour figure carefully before you start.
- The weights in cups1/2 lb sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; 1/4 lb butter is half a cup (one stick); 1 pint milk is 2 cups. 1 1/2 lb flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups, which is a great deal of flour for that liquid.
- The flour is the sticking pointAt 1 1/2 lb the batter comes out very stiff, which suits the opening description of a compound "midway between cake and batter pudding" but will strike many cooks as dry. Cutting the flour to about 1 lb (3 1/2 cups) gives a batter that drops from the spoon and bakes closer to a modern cottage pudding. Whether the original figure is a misprint or simply a heavier style cannot be settled from the page.
- LeaveningThree teaspoons of baking powder for 5 1/2 cups of flour is light by current practice, which runs nearer a teaspoon per cup. Nineteenth-century baking powders were generally single-acting and spent themselves quickly; if you reduce the flour as above, keep the three teaspoons and mix promptly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F: about 25 minutes for a shallow pan cut in squares, 40 minutes or a little more for a deep cake mould. Test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Creaming order"Make up like pound cake" means cream the butter and sugar until pale, then beat in the eggs two at a time so the emulsion does not break. The recipe then calls for the milk, followed by the flour with the powder and salt; cold milk added all at once to a butter-sugar base may curdle it.
- Raspberry vinegarNot a salad vinegar but a sweet fruit shrub syrup, raspberries steeped in vinegar and boiled with sugar, thinned into a pouring sauce. Bottled raspberry shrub or a raspberry syrup sharpened with a spoonful of cider vinegar stands in for it; the author's own lemon syrup sauce is the alternative he suggests.
- Yield and servingAs written this fills a 9x13 pan generously and serves twelve or more. Cottage pudding is meant to be eaten warm with the sauce poured over each portion, not sauced in advance.
- Ignore the essayEverything after the sauce note is the author's running commentary on his imaginary pudding exposition, and the closing line points forward to a green-corn pudding recipe that follows. None of it bears on this batter.
Cottage pudding is one of the plainest dishes in the American dessert repertory: an unfrosted butter cake baked in a pan, cut warm, and made into a pudding entirely by its sauce. It appears here as a vehicle for a sauce, raspberry vinegar being the English one the author wants to introduce. That sauce belongs to the old family of fruit shrubs, in which vinegar and sugar preserved summer raspberries, and British cooks poured it over batter puddings and pancakes. The digression that follows the recipe is the kind of comic essay run together with instruction in nineteenth-century American trade cookery writing, and its speculations about sago and the origin of Native peoples are period nonsense rather than anything to be taken seriously. Sago is indeed palm pith from the East Indies, and manioca is cassava; neither has any connection to the place-names the author lists, which come from several unrelated languages.