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Cottage Pudding
1 cup milk ¼ cup butter ⅔ cup sugar 1 egg 2¼ cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten; mix and sift flour, baking powder, and salt; add alternately with milk to first mixture; turn into buttered cake-pan; bake thirty-five minutes. Serve with Vanilla or Hard Sauce.
A plain butter cake baked in a single pan and served hot under a sauce — the pudding here is the sauce, not the batter. It comes together in about ten minutes of mixing.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is given; thirty-five minutes suits a moderate oven, and 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent. The recipe specifies only a buttered cake-pan; a 9-inch square or 8-inch round holds the batter well. Test with a skewer at 30 minutes.
- Butter quantityThe fat is given as a quarter cup — 4 tablespoons, 2 oz. This is a lean cake by modern standards, which is why it wants a sauce.
- SaltThe text prints 1½ teaspoon, almost certainly a misprint; half a teaspoon is the proportion that suits 2¼ cups of flour here, and three times that would make the cake unpleasantly salty.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2¼ cups of flour is heavier leavening than a modern cake would use, reflecting the weaker, single-acting powders of the period. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a cleaner rise and less aftertaste.
- CreamingWith this little butter, the creaming stage matters. Beat the butter and sugar until visibly pale before the egg goes in, or the crumb turns dense.
- Alternating additionsBegin and end with the dry mixture, in three additions of flour and two of milk, and stop mixing the moment the flour disappears. Overworking is the usual cause of a tough cottage pudding.
- The saucesHard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavouring, served cold in a lump on the hot cake so it melts. Vanilla sauce is a thin cornstarch-thickened sweet sauce, poured over. Either is essential — the cake is deliberately plain.
- YieldAbout nine squares from a 9-inch pan, best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Cottage pudding is the American answer to a problem every plain kitchen faced: how to put a hot pudding on the table without a steamer, a pudding cloth, or hours of attention. The name is often said to signal modesty rather than any particular cottage — a traditional derivation rather than a documented one — and it appears in New England cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century, simply meaning a cheap butter cake eaten hot with sauce. Its place in the Boston Cooking-School book, among the steamed and boiled hot puddings, shows the direction domestic cookery was moving: chemical leavening and a cake pan replacing the long steam. The sauce did the work that suet and dried fruit used to do, and hard sauce in particular carried over from the older English pudding tradition, where a cold, sweet, buttery lump melting into a hot pudding was the expected finish.