With Raisins
1 1/2 pounds of flour. 3 quarts of milk or water. 4 large basting-spoons of butter, melted. 2 large basting spoons of golden syrup. 12 eggs. Salt. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. 1 pound of seedless raisins. Mix up as you would batter cakes, wetting the flour gradually to have no lumps; the milk tepid, the butter melted, the eggs well beaten and powder and syrup last. Pour into 2 buttered pans made warm an inch deep, and sprinkle the raisins all over. Bake about 20 minutes, or till light brown. Serve in squares with lemon syrup or any pudding sauce.
This is a hotel-scale baked batter pudding — closer to a thick Yorkshire pudding or a pfannkuchen than to a cake — cut in squares and sauced. A few of the quantities need interpretation before you start.
- The liquid looks wrongOne and a half pounds of flour (about 5 1/2 cups) against 3 quarts of milk gives a batter thinner than cream, which will not hold an inch deep in a pan or set in 20 minutes. Compare with the 12 eggs, and 3 pints reads far more plausibly than 3 quarts; treat the figure as suspect and add liquid only until the batter is the consistency of heavy cream.
- Basting-spoonsThe capacity is not standardised; a large kitchen basting spoon of the period held on the order of 1 fluid ounce (2 tablespoons), which would make 4 spoons of melted butter about 1/2 cup and 2 spoons of syrup about 1/4 cup. Any large serving spoon is close enough.
- Golden syrupLyle's-style golden syrup, a light cane refiner's syrup, still sold and worth seeking out for its faint caramel note. Light corn syrup is the nearest substitute; honey works but flavours the batter more assertively.
- Oven heatWhitehead gives none. A batter an inch deep that browns in about 20 minutes implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425F is a reasonable modern guess rather than anything the text specifies. The instruction to butter and warm the pans first is explicit, so follow it.
- The leavening is mostly eggsOne teaspoon of baking powder to 1 1/2 pounds of flour does almost nothing on its own. The lift comes from twelve well-beaten eggs and steam, and the recipe does specify that the pans go into the oven buttered and warm.
- Raisins on top, not stirred inThe recipe has them sprinkled over the poured batter rather than mixed through; whether this was to keep them off the hot pan bottom or simply the quicker hotel method, the text does not say.
- Seedless raisinsIn nineteenth-century American usage this distinguished raisins from seedless grape varieties from the seeded sorts that had to be stoned by hand, not the modern distinction between raisins and currants. Ordinary supermarket raisins are what is wanted.
- YieldVery large: two pans filled an inch deep, cut into squares. The recipe does not say what size pans, so the square count is anyone's guess. Halve or quarter the whole formula for a household, and serve warm, since a batter pudding of this kind collapses and toughens as it cools.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who cooked in American hotels and restaurants, and this reads like a kitchen note rather than a domestic recipe: quantities by the pound and the quart, and a yield meant to be cut into squares and plated to order with whatever pudding sauce was already made up. Baked batter puddings of this family descend from the English tradition of pouring a pancake batter into a hot buttered pan and letting the oven do the work, dressed up here with dried fruit and golden syrup so it could pass as dessert. Its appearance in a pastry cook's manual is a reminder of how much of the nineteenth-century sweet course was cheap flour, milk and eggs, rescued by a sauce.